Ouida_Strathmore.txt topic ['13', '324', '378', '393']
CHAPTER I.
WHITE LADIES.
White Ladies did not mean snowdrops, by their
pretty old English name, ghosts in white cere-clothes,
or belles in white tarlatan. It was only an old
densely-wooded estate down in one of those counties
that give Creswick his cool chequered shade and wild
forest streams, his shallow sunny brooks, and pic-
turesque roadsides ; but which, I am told by superior
taste, are terribly insipid and miserably tame, with
many other epithets I do not care to repeat, having
a lingering weakness myself for the old bridle-paths
with the boughs meeting above head, the hawthorn
hedges powdered with their snowy blossom, and the
rich meadow lands with their tall grasses, and clover,
and cowslips, where cattle stand up to their hocks in
fresh wild thyme, and shadows lengthen slowly and
lazily through long summer days.
VOL. I. B
Z STEATHMOEE.
White Ladies was an ancient and stately abbey, the
last relic of lands once wide and numerous as Wax-
wick's ere he fell at Gladsmoor Heath ; a single pos-
session though that lordly enough where it had
been but one among a crowded beadroll of estates
which had stretched over counties before they were
parcelled out and divided, some amongst the hungry
courtiers who fattened upon abbey lands ; some among
the Hanoverian rabble, who scrambled for the goodly
spoils of loyal gentlemen ; some, later on, among the
vampires of Israel, who, like their forefather and first
usurer, Jacob, know well how to treat with the
famished, and sell us our mess of pottage at no smaller
price than our birthright.
In the days of Monkery and of Holy Church,
White Ladies had been a great Dominican monas-
tery, rich in its wealth and famous in its sanctity;
though since then the great Gothic pile had been
blasted with petronels, burned with flame, and rid-
dled with the bullets of the Ironsides. Yet, when
the western sun slanted in flecks of gold through
the boughs of the wych-elms, and fell on the panes
of the blazoned mndows, or the moonlight streaming
across the sward, gleamed through the pointed arches
and aisles, and down the ivy-covered cloisters, the
abbey had still a stately and solemn beauty, given to
it in ancient times by the cunning hand of master
masons, when men built for art and not for greed, and
lavished love in lieu of lusting gold, when they
worked for a long lifetime to leave some imperishable
WHITE LADIES. 3
record of their toil, and were grandly heedless how
their names might perish and be forgot. It stood
down in deep secluded western valleys on the borders
of the sea, shut in by dense forest lands which covered
hill and dale for miles about it, and sheltered in
their recesses the dun deer in their coverts and the
grey herons by their pools ; a silent, solitarj-, royal
place, where the axe never sounded among the cente-
narian trees, and the sylvan glory was never touched
by the Vandal of time and the Goth of steam, that
elsewhere are swiftly sapping what Tudor iconoclasts
spared, and destroying what Puritan petards left
free.
Through the elm-boughs that swayed against the
carvings with which Norman builders had enriched
the pile; through the tangled ivy that hid where
Cromwell's breach had blasted, and where Henry's
troops had sacked; through the heraldic blazonries
upon the panes, where the arms of the Strathmores
with their fierce motto, " Slai/j and spare not I " were
stained, the summer sun shone into one of the cham-
bers at White Ladies.
In olden days, and turn by turn as time went on
and fortunes changed, the chamber had been the
audience-place of the Lord Abbot, where he had re-
ceived high nobles who sought the sanctuary because
the price of blood was on their heads, or thriftless
kings of Plantagenet who came to pray the aid of
Mother Church for largesse to their troops ere they
b2
4: STRATHMORE.
set sail for Palestine. It had been the bower-room
of a captive queen, where Mary had sat over her
tapestry thinking of the years so long gone by, when
on her soft childish brow, fair with the beauty of
Stuart and Guise, the astrologer had seen the taint of
foreshadowed woe and the presage of death under the
soft golden curls. It had been the favourite haunt
of Coui't beauties where they had read the last paper
of Spec, and pondered over new pulvillios, and rejoiced
that the peace had been made at Utrecht, to bring
them the French mode and Paris chocolate, and
thought in their secretly-disaffected hearts of the
rising that was fomenting among the gallant gentle-
men of the North, and of the cypher letter lying
under the lace in their bosoms from one brave to
rashness, and thrice well-beloved because in danger
for the Cause, who was travelling secretly and swiftly
to St. Germain.
Now the Plantagenets had died out, root and
branch, the tapestry woven by Mary was faded and
motheaten, the Court beauties were laid in the chapel
vault, and the oriel-chamber was scented with La-
takia, Manillas, Burgundies, and liqueurs, while three
or four men sat at breakfast with a group of retrievers
on the hearth. The sun falling through the case-
ments, shone on the brass andirons, the oak carvings,
the purple silk of the hangings, and on the game and
fruits, coffee and Rhenish, that were crowded in pro-
fusion on the table, at which the host and the guests
of White Ladies lounged ; smoking and looking over
WHITE LADIES. 5
the contents of the letter-bag, peeling an apricot, or
cutting into a foie gras, silent, lazy, and inert, for
there was nothing to tempt them out but the rab-
bits, and the morning was warm, and the shaded room
pleasant.
At the head of his table the host sat in shadow, where
the light of the outer day did not reach, but left the
purple hangings of the wall with the dead gold of their
embroideries in gloom behind him. He was a man then
of nine-and-twenty or thirty, but who looked some-
thing older than he was ; he was tall and slightly
made, and wore a black velvet morning coat. His
face was singularly striking and impressive, more by
expression than by feature it was such a counte-
nance, as you see in old Italian portraits, and in some
Vandykes, bearing in them power strangely blended
with passion, and repose with recklessness ; his hair,
moustaches, and beard were of a dark chesnut hue ;
his mouth was very beautifully formed, with the smile
generous, but rare ; the eyebrows were dark, straight,
and finely pencilled; the eyes grey. And it was in these,
when they lightened to steel-like brilliance, or darkened
black as night with instantaneous and pitiless anger,
that an acute physiognomist would have inferred for
him danger, and evil to himself and to others, which
would arise from a spring as yet, perhaps^ unknown
and unsealed ; and that an artist studying his face, in
which his art would have found no flaw, would have
said that this man would be relentless, and might
have predicted, as the Southern sculptor prophesied
6 STEATHMOEE.
of Charles Stuart, "Something evil will befal him.
He carries misfortune on his face."
He lay back in his chair, turning over his letters,
looking idly one by one at them, not opening some,
and not reading wholly through any ; many of them
had feminine superscriptions, and scarlet or azure
ehiffres at the seal, as delicately scented as though
they had been brought by some court page, rather
than by the rougli route of the mail-bag. They
afforded him a certain amusement that summer's
morning, and Strathmore of Wliite Ladies this
man with the eyes of a Catiline and the face of a
Strafford ^liad no care greater on his mind for either
the present or the future just then than that his
keepers had told him the broods were very scanty,
and the young birds had died off shockingly in the
early parts of the spring ; that he was summoned to
go on a diplomatic mission to Bulgaria to confer with
a crabbed Prince Michel, before he cared to leave
England; and that one of his fair correspondents,
Nina Montolieu, a Free Companion, whose motto
blazoned on her pretty fluttering pennon, was a very
rapacious " tout prendre I " might be a little more
troublesome than was agreeable, and give him a
taste of the tenacious griffes now that he had tired
of playing with the pattes de velours. He had
nothing graver or darker to trouble him, as he
leant back in the shade where the sunlight did not
come, glancing out now and then to the masses of
forest, and the grey cloisters, ivy -hung and crumbling
WHITE LADIES. 7
to ruins, that were given to view through the opened
windows of his chamber. His face was the face of a
State-conspirator of Velasquez, of a doomed Noble of
Vandyke ; but his life was the easy, nonchalant, un-
troubled, unchequered life of an English gentleman
of our days ; and his thoughts were the thoughts that
are natural to, and that run in couple with, such a
life. " Born to calamit/' would have been as little
applicable then to Cecil Strathmore as it seemed to
Charles of England, when he and Villiers looked into
the long eyes of the Spanish donnas and drank to the
loveliness of Henriette de Bourbon. But in those
joyous, brilliant days of Madrid and Paris, the shadow
of the future had not fallen across the threshold of
Whitehall, neither as yet had it fallen here, across
the threshold of White Ladies.
He looked up and turned a little in his chair as the
door opened, and the smile that was the more brilliant
and the more attractive because extremely rare, lighted
his face.
" You incorrigible fellow ! the coffee is cold, and
the claret is corked, and the omelettes are overdone,
but it's no more than you deserve. Won't you ever
be punctual % We were going down to Hurst Warren
at nine, and it's now eleven. You are the most idle
dog, Erroll, under heaven ! "
"You were only down yourself six minutes ago
(I asked Craven), so don't you talk, my good fel-
low. You have been reading the first volume of
the ^ Amours d'une Femme,' and sending the rabbits
8 STEATHMORE.
to the deuce ; and I've been reading the second, and
consigning them to the devil, so we're quits. A
summer morning's made for a French novel in bed,
with the window open and the birds singing outside ;
pastorals and pruriencies go uncommonly nicely to-
gether, rather like lemons and rum, you know. Con-
trasts are always cAz'c/"
With which enunciation of doctrine the new comer
sat down, rolled his chair up to the table, and began
an inspection of some lobster cutlets a la Marechale,
taking a cup of creamy chocolate from the servant
behind him, while Strathmore looked at him with a
smile still on his lips, and a cordial look in his eyes,
as if the mere sound of the other's voice were pleasant
to him. The belated guest was a man of his own
age, or some few years older ; in frame and sinew he
was superb; in style he was rather like a dashing
Free Lance, a gallant debonnair captain of Bourbon's
Reiters, with his magnificent muscle and reckless
brilliance, though he was as gentle as a woman and as
lazy as a Circassian girl. He called himself the
handsomest man in the Service, and had the palm
given him undisputingly ; for the frank, clear, azure
eyes that grew so soft in love, so trustful in friend-
ship, the long fair hair sweeping off a forehead white
as the most delicate blonde's, the handsome features
with their sunny candour and their gay sensuous
smile, made his face almost as attractive to men as to
women. As for the latter, indeed, they strewed his
path with the conqueror's myrtle-leaves. His loves
WHITE LADIES. 9
were as innumerable as the stars, and by no means so
eternal ; and if now and then the beau sexe had the
best of the warfare, it was only because they are
never compassionate on those who surrender to them
at once, and whom they can bind and lead captive at
their will, which the least experienced could do at
one stroke with Bertie Erroll, as he freely and la-
mentingly confessed. The Beau Sabreur, as he had
been nicknamed, a la Murat, was soft as silk in the
hands of a beauty, and impressionable as wax when
fauy fingers were at work. He had never in his
life resisted a woman, and avowed himself utterly
unable to do so. Have you ever known the science
that brought Laomedon to grief of any avail against
the Lydian Queen ?
"Letters ! Why will they write them?" he said,
as he glanced at the small heap of feminine corre-
spondence piled beside his plate. " It's such a pity !
it only makes us feel bearish, bored, and miserably
ungrateful ; wastes an hour to get through them re-
ligiously, or hangs a millstone of unperformed duty
and unexpiated debt about our necks for the livelong
day, till post-time comes round again and makes bad
worse!"
" Why will they write them?" echoed Strathmore,
giving a contemptuous push of his elbow to Nina
Montolieu's envelope, a souvenir of the past season,
with which he could very well have dispensed. " Our
Brinvilliers poison us with patchouli paper, and stab
us with a crowquill. One might like to ' die of a rose
10 STEATHMORE.
in aromatic pain/ but I would ratlier not die of three
scented sheets crossed ! Correspondence is cruel
with women. If you dorCt answer them, you feel
sinful and discourteous ; if you do answer them, you
only supply them with ammunition to fire on to
you afresh with fifty more rounds of grape and
canister. They love to spend then' whole mornings
skimming over a thousand lines, and miiding up with
' Toujours a toi !' They love to write honey to you
with one pen, and gall about you with another ; they
love to address their dearest friends on a rose-tinted
sheet, and fold it to damn them on a cream-coloured
one. Writing is women's metier; but it is deucedly
hard that they mil inflict the results upon us !"
'^ It's an odd psychological fact that women will
write on for a twelvemonth unanswered, as religiously
as they wipe their pens, omit then' dates, and believe
in the acceleration of postal speed by an ' Immediate'
on the envelope," put in Phil Danvers from the
bottom of the table, helping himself to some Stras-
bourg pate. " Some of them write delightfully,
though Tricksey Bellevoix does. Her notes are the
most delicious olla podrida of news, mots, historiettes,
and little tit-bits of confidence imaginable ; she always
tells you, too, mischievous things of the people you
don't like, instead of scandalising people you do, after
the ordinary fashion. Her letters are not bad fun at
all when you're smoking, and want something to look
at for ten minutes."
" I'll tell her how you rate them ! She's going to
WHITE LADIES. 11
Cliarlemont next week. See if you get any more
letters, Phil!" cried Erroll.
" My dear fellow, if we turned king's evidence on
one another, I don't think we should get any more
feminine favours at all !" laughed Strathmore. " Very
few of them would relish the chit-chat about them if
they'd correct reports from the club windows and
short-hand notes from the smoking-rooms. Would
you be let in again to the violet boudoir in Brtrton-
street if Lady Fitz knew you'd told me last night that
she had the very devil's own temper ? and would Dan
be called ^ami choisi de mon coeur,' if Madame la
Baronne knew that when he gets her notes he says,
^ Deuce take the woman ! how she bothers,' audibly
in White's ? Try that grilse, Langton it was in the
river yesterday."
" And is prime. It would have been worth Georgie's
trolling."
" Georoie lost all her rings last week in the Dee
two thousand pounds' worth in diamonds and sapphires
serve her perfectly right ! What business has she
with March browns and dun governors?" said the
host of White Ladies, drawing a plate of peaches to
him. "I cannot conceive what women ai'e about
when they take up that line of thing. How can they
imagine an ill-done replica of ourselves can attract us !
A fast woman is an anomaly, and all anomalies are
jarring and bizarre. To kiss lips that smell of smoke
^to hear one's belle amie welcome one with 'AH
serene!' to see her 'bugle eyeball and her cheek of
12 STRATHMOEE.
cream' only sparkle and flush for a tan gallop and a
Kawcliffe yearling to have her boudoir as horsy as
the Comer, and her walk a cross between a swing and
a strut ! Pah ! give me women as soft, and as deli-
cate, and as velvet as my peaches !"
"Peaches?" put in ErroU. "Ominous simile!
Your soft women will have an uncommonly hard
stone at their core, and a kernel that's poison under
the velvet skin, mon cher Cis !"
'^Soit! I only brush the bloom, and taste the
sweetness!" yawned Strathmore. "A wise man
never lingers long enough over the same to have
time to come to the core. With peaches and women,
it's only the side next the sun that's tempting ; if you
find acid in either, leave them for the downy blush of
another ! How poetic we grow ! Is it the Ehefiish ?
That rich, old, amber, mellow wine always has a
flavour of Hoffmann's fancies and Jean Paul's verse
about it ; it smells of the Rheingau ! I don't wonder
Schiller took his inspirations from it. I say, Erroll,
I heard from Eokeby this morning. He doesn't say
a word about the Sartory betting, nor yet of the
White Duchess scandal. He is only full of two
things : La Pucelle's chances of the Prix de Rastatt
at Baden, and of this beauty he's raving of, something
superb, according to him, a Creole, I think he says
Lady Vavasour ! Really one's bored to death with
ecstasies about that woman ! Have you heard the
name ? / have lots of times, but I've always missed
her."
WHITE LADIES. 13
"Vavasour? Vavasour? The deuce, I have
rather!" said Erroll, thrown into a beatific vision by
the mere name of the lady under discussion, while he
stirred some more cream into his chocolate.
"Who was she?" asked Langton, of the 16th
Lancers, who was only just back from service in
Bengal.
" More than I can tell you, my boy. I believe it's
more than anybody knows. She sprang into society
like Aphrodite from the sea-foam. One may as well
be graceful in metaphor, eh? You mean a Creole,
Strathmore, made a tremendous row at St. Petersburg
came nobody knew precisely whence ^hadn't been
seen till she appeared as Lady Vavasour and Vaux
tooling a six-in-hand pony-trap, with pages of honour
in lapis-lazuli Kveries, that created a furore in Long-
champs, and made the Pre Catalan crowded to get a
glimpse of her. Ever since then all Europe's been
at her feet!"
"That's the woman!" broke in Danvers. "Oh,
she's divine, they say. Everybody goes mad after
her, and can't help himself. Scrope Waverley raved
of her ; he saw her at Biarritz, and swears she's quite
matchless. She's the most capricious coquette, too,
that ever broke hearts with a fan-handle!"
"Hearts! Faugh!" sneered Strathmore; and,
when he did so, his face was very cold a coldness
strangely at variance with the swift, dark passions
that slumbered in his eyes. " My good fellow, don't
give us a rechauffe of Scrope Waverle/s sentimental
14 STEATHMORE.
nonsense! The man must be weaker than the fan-
handle if he be ruled by it."
Erroll lifted his eyebrows, and sighed :
" May be ! But the little ivory sticks play the
deuce with us when they're well managed."
" Speak for yourself ! Don't make your confes-
sions in the plural, that their folly may sound general,
pray!"
" Oh, yoii you're a confounded cold fellow !
Wear chained armour, wrap yourself in asbestos,
and all that sort of thing, ^ larva kisses' wouldn't
melt you, and Helen wouldn't move you unless you
chose ! "
Strathmore laughed a little.
" Wliy should they ? It is only fools who go in
fetters. I can not comprehend that madness about a
woman to lie at her feet and come at her call, and
take her caresses one minute and her neglect the
next, as if you were her spaniel, with nothing better
to do than to live in her bondage! It is miserably
contemptible ! What is weakness if that isn't one, eh ? "
Erroll flung the envelope with the scarlet chiffre,
lying on the table within reach of his hand, at his
host and friend, as proof and reproof of the nullity of
his doctrines.
" Most noble lord ! you have the cheek to talk
coldly and disdainfully like that, while you know
you are in the net of the MontoHeu, and Heaven
knows how many others besides !"
Strathmore laughed again as the envelope fluttered
WHITE LADIES. 15
down on the ground, falling short of him where he lay
back in his f auteuil :
" Becasse ! that is a very different affair. Nina is
a dashing little lawless lady, and knows how to pillage
with both hands ; one must pay if one dallies with
the Free Companions. You don't suppose she ever
held me in her bondage, or flattered herself she did
for an hour, do you ? No one was ever in love with
that sort of women after t\^^ty; one makes love to
them in parenthesis as it were, of course, but that's
quite another thing. It is how you lose your hearts
how you hang on a smile, how you let yourselves be
marked and hit and brought down like the silHest
noddy-bird that ever sat to be shot at, how you go
mad after one woman, and that one woman with, nine
times out of ten,, nothing worth worshipping about
her it is that which I can't understand."
" Thank your stars I" said Erroll, softly, and with
a profound sigh of envy. "Go about with your
noli me tangere shield, and be piously thankful you've
got it then. Only the ^haughty in their strength,'
et csetera, you know what's the rest of the scriptural
warning? unbelievers do come to grief sometimes
for their hardened heterodoxy! This superb Vava-
som', I want dreadfully to see her. They say she is
the best thing we have had for a long time, since the
Duchesse d'lvore was in her first prime."
" She must be the same I heard so much about in
Paris last winter; she was passing the season in
Rome, so I missed seeing her. She has the most
16 STEATHMOEE.
wayward caprices, tliey say, of any living woman,"
said Danvers, turning over the leaves of the morn-
ing papers ; " but the caprices d^une belle femme are
always bewitching and always permissible. A great
beauty has no sins ; she may do what she likes, and
we forgive her, even with the leopard claws in our
skin. The pretty panther ! it looks so handsome and
so soft ; its very crimes are only mischief."
" You haven't been in^ Scinde, Phil," said Langton,
with the grim smile of a campaigner who hears
those who have never suffered jest at scars; while
their host, rather tired of this breakfast-chat about
women, turned to his unopened correspondence, till
his guests, having thrown their letters away, to be
answered at any distant and hazardous future, having
yawned over the papers, casually remarking that that
poor devil Allington's divorce case was put off till
next session?, or that there was an awful row in South
Mexico, rose by general consent, and began to think
of the rabbits.
White Ladies was one of the pleasantest places to
visit at in England. A long beadroU might have
been cited of houses that eclipsed it in every point,
but the Abbey had a charm, as it had a beauty, of its
own. In the deep recesses of its vast forest-lands
there were drives of deer that gave more royals in
one day's sport than were ever found south of the
Cheviots. In the dark pools, some of them well-nigh
inaccessible, where they lay between gorse-covered
hills or down in wooded valleys, the wild fowl flocked
WHITE LADIES. 17
by legions. The river, that ran in and out, of which
you just caught glimpses from the west windows,
flashing between the boughs in the distance, was
famed for its salmon, and had in olden days given
char and trout to the tables of the monastery, whose
celebrity had reached to royal Windsor and princely
Sheen, and made the Tudor covetous for the land
and water that yielded such good fare. Sport was to
be had in perfection among the brakes and woods at
White Ladies ; and within, even in the very bachelor
dens overlooking the cloisters, there were luxury and
comfort; while fair women used to come down to
White Ladies, sufficiently lovely to rouse the sleeping
Dominicans from their graves, as they swept through
the aisles of the chapel ; and laughter would ring out
from the smoking-room, when the men had their feet
in the papooshes and their pipes in their mouths, loud
enough to wake all the echoes of the abbey, and make
the dead monks, lying under the sward, turn in their
tombs and cross themselves, at the profanity of their
successors and supplanters.
White Ladies was a grand old place, and Strath-
more was envied by most of his friends and acquaint-
ance for its possession. It had come to him by the
listaff side, from his mother's father, who, failing
leirs male in the direct line, had left it to him
n condition that he assumed his name. Strath-
lore bore a close resemblance to his mother's family,
whose name he had taken ; he had nothing either
in feature or in character in common with the easy,
VOL. I.
18 STEATHMORE.
inert, sensual, placable, Saxon Castlemeres, with
their Teuton good humour and their Teuton phlegm,
but he inherited in every point the type of the
Strathmores, that courtly, silent, Norman race, swift
and fierce in passion, dark and implacable in hate,
keen to avenge, slow to forgive, imperious in love^
and cold in hate ; and with the features might go the
character.
Others do not know, we do not know om-selves,
all that lies latent in us, until the seeds of good
or evil that are hidden and unknown, germinate
to deed and blossom into action, and make us reap for
weal or woe the harvest we have sown. If with the
countenance, he inherited the character, of those who
had ruled before him at White Ladies, there had
been little in his life to develop the unroused nature.
The darker traits might have died out with the darker
times, as the mailed surcoat of steel had been replaced
by a velvet morning coat, as the iron portcullis had
been put away by a gold-fringed portiere, as the cul-
verin above the gateway had been removed for the
soft, silken folds of a flag. Lions long kept in a tame
life lose their desert instinct and their thirst for
blood, so the Strathmores in long centuries of com!
life might have outworn and lost wdiat had been evil
and dangerous in them in the days of Plantagenet, of
Lancaster, and of York. Or, if the nature were not
dead, but only sleeping, there was nothing to arouse
it ; things went smoothly and well with Strathmore ;
WHITE LADIES. 19
he had birth, fortune, talents of a high order ; lie Avas
courted by women, partly because he was very x:old to
them, chiefly, doubtless, because he was youngei^^son
of the Marquis of Castlemere and master of White
Ladies. In a diplomatic career he had a wide field for
the ambitions that attracted him the ambition not of
place, wealth, or title, but of Power, the deep, subtle
state power that had in all ages fascinated the Strath-
mores, and been melded by them successfully and
skilfully. Life lay clear, brilliant, unruffled behind
him and before him. If there ran in his blood the
old spirit of the Strathmores, that had often worked
their oi^ai doom and been their own scourge, that
gleamed from their eyes in the old portraits by
Antonio More, and Jameson, and Vandyke, hang-
ing in the vaulted picture-gallery at the Abbey, and
that made those who looked on them understand
how those coui'tly, elegant, suave gentlemen had been
swift to steel, and pitiless in pursuit, and imperious in
ire, if this spirit still ran in his blood it was dormant,
and had never been wakened to its strength. Oppor-
tunity is the forcing-house that gives birth to all
things ; without it, seeds will never ripen into fruit ;
with it, much that might otherwise have died out in-
nocuous expands to baneful force. Man works half
his own doom, and circumstance works the other
half. Yet, because we have not been tempted, we
therefore believe we can stand ; because we have not
yet been brought nigh the furnace, we therefore hold
02
20 STBATHMOEE.
ourselves to be fire-proof ! Mes freres, the best of us
are fools, I fear ! The steel is not proven till it has
passed through the flames.
Sooner or later ^though they may lie to it long, half
a lifetime, perhaps ^I believe that men and women
are all true to their physiognomies ; that they prove,
sooner or later, that the index Nature has writ (though
written in crabbed, uncertain characters which few
can read altogether aright) upon their features is not a
wrong nor a false one. Men lie, but Nature does not.
They dissemble, but she speaks out. They conceal,
but she tells the truth. What is carved on the features,
will develop, some time or other, in the career. When
Bernini made the prophecy that foretold ill for the
heir of England, could any prediction seem more
absurd? Yet Charles Stuart wrought his own fate,
and the fruit of the past, whose seed had been sown
by his own hands, was bitter between his teeth when
the foretold calamity fell, black and ghastly, betwixt
the People and the Throne. Strathmore's life, cold,
clear, cloudless as the air of a glittering, still, winter's
noon, was utterly at variance with his physiognomy
the physiognomy which had the eyes of a Catiline and
the face of a Strafford ! Yet, as time went on, and
he passed of his own will into a path which a man
stronger in one sense, and weaker in another, would
have never entered, the spirit that was latent in him
awoke, and wrought his own fate and wove his own
scourge more darkly and more erringly, because more
consciously and more resolutely, than Charles Stuart ;
WHITE LADIES. 21
making him eat of the fruit of his own sowing to the
full as bitterly as he of England, who might never
have bowed his head to the axe that chill January^
morning, when a king fell, amidst the silence of an
assembled multitude, if the first obstinate error which
had seemed sweet to him had been put aside, and the
first wilful turn out of the right path been avoided :
the turn so slight ! that led on to the headsman
and the scaffold !
22
CHAPTER II.
UNDER THE SHADOW OF THE ELMS.
The rabbits were tame in comparison with the
drives for which the forests of White Ladies were
famed, and with the bouquets of pheasants that the
battues afforded later on in the year ; still they were
better than nothing, and were peppered faute de mieux
that day. But the chief thing done by the whole
quartette, was to lie under the trees and drink the iced
champagne-cup and Badminton, brought there, with
a cold luncheon, on an Exmoor pony by the under-
keepers about two o'clock; which was, however, as
pleasant occupation for idleness on a sultry summer's
day as anything that could be suggested, while the
smoke curled up through the leafy roofing above head,
and the dogs lay about on the moss with their tongues
out, hot, tired, and excited, and the mavises and black-
birds sang in the boughs.
"Where the deuce is the Sabreur?" asked Phil
UNDER THE SHADOW OF THE ELMS. 23
Danvers, when the rabbits had been slain by the
score, and the chimes of the Abbey, ringing seven
o'clock with the slow, musical chant of the " Adeste
Fideles," came over the woods, and warned them that
the dressing-bell must be going, and that it was time
to think about dinner.
" By George ! I don't know," said Strathmore. " I
haven't seen him for the last hour. Didn't he say
something about the Euston Coppice ? I dare say he
is gone there after the rabbits ; we must have missed
him somewhere."
" It's easy to lose oneself in these woods of yours,
Strathmore," said Langton, striking a fresh fusee.
" The timber^s so tremendously thick, and there are
no paths to speak of ; you never have the wood cut
doA^Qi, do you ? "
" Cut down ! Certainly not ! My good fellow, do
you think the woods of White Ladies go for building
pui-poses? I wonder Bertie is gone off like that.
Pritchard, have you seen Major ErroU ? "
" I see the Major a going toward the coppice, my
lord, about an hour ago, when we was beatmg of the
Near Acre a going down that ere path, my lord," re-
sponded Pritchard, the under-keeper.
" Queer fellow ! " said Strathmore, as he gave his
gun to one of the boys, and lighted a weed. " What
did he go off for, I wonder ? He must have missed
us, somehow."
" Perhaps he's taken a wrong cut, and will wander
miserably till the soup's cold and the fish overdone,"
24 STEATHMORE.
suggested Danvers. " Lady Millicent is coming to-
night, ain't she, with the Harewood people ? He'll
hang himself if he isn't in in time to take her in to
dinner ; he swears by her just now, you know. The
Sabreur's eternally in love ! Who isn't, though ? "
'^ i'm not," said Strathmore, with perfect veracity.
It was somewhat his pride that he had never lost his
head for any woman in his life.
" Because you're panoplied with protocols, and
sworn to the State I You're a cursed cold fellow^,
Cis always were!" interrupted Danvers, with a
mixture of impatience and envy. "Bertie has lost
himself, I bet you. I was benighted once, don't
you remember? If he miss Lady Millicent, he'll
hang himself, to a certainty ! We must ask her for
one of her rose ribbons to made the suicide effective !"
" I'll go round by the coppice home, and look for
him," said Strathmore. " There are two hours before
the people come. I shall be back in plenty of time.
Au revoirl^you and Phil want longer for your
toilettes than I do, because you'll dress for the Hare-
wood women ! "
It was a splendid evening clear, sultry, with an
amber light falling through the aisles of the trees, and
long shadows deepening across the sward, while the
wild fowl went to roost beside the pools, and the
herons dipped their beaks into the dark cool waters
that lay deep and still, with broad-leaved lilies and
tangled river plants floating languidly on their surface.
Strathmore left his guests to take the shorter cut that
UNDEE THE SHADOW OP THE ELMS. 25
led direct to the side-door of the bachelors' wing, and
strolled himself through Euston Coppice, a wild,
solitary, intricate bit of the park, that had more of
the luxuriant forest-growth of parts of Lower Brittany
than of the tamer, more cultivated look of English
woodlands. Some volcanic convulsion long ages ago
had rent and split the earth in this part into a fantastic
surface, the gaps so filled up by furze, hazel, and
yellow heath, and the rugged sides so covered that
the right track might very easily be lost. He walked
onward, looking about him ; for he thought it possible
that Erroll might have missed the right path, and
that he might fall in with him as he passed home-
wards.
Bertie was the solitary person whom Strathmore
could ever have been said to have loved. His attach-'
ment was very difficult to rouse ; in the world, people,
specially pretty coquettes, called him without any heart,
perhaps without any feeling. It was true that he had
never lost his head after any of them ; his indifference
was no affectation, and his vaunted panoply no pretence;
the Strathmores had always better liked state plot and
subtle power than the women whose odorous tresses
had swept over their Milan corslets, and whose golden
heads had been pillowed on their breasts. To Erroll,
Strathmore bore, however, a much deeper attachment
than beauty had ever won from him the attachment
of a nature that gives both love and friendship very
rarely; but when it gives either gives instantly,
blindly, and trustingly ; the nature that had always
26 STEATHMOEE.
been characteristic of the " swift, silent, Strathmores,"
as the alhteration of cradle chronicles and provincial
legends nicknamed the race which had reigned at Wliite
Ladies since Hastings. The friendship between them
was the friendship closer than brotherhood of dead
Greece and old Judaea the bright truthfulness, the
soft laziness, the candour, the dash, the verve, the
hundred attractive, attachable qualities of Erroll's
character, endeared him to Strathmore by that strange
force of contrast which has so odd a spell sometimes in
friendship as in love ; and the bond between them was
as close and firmly riven as a clasp of steel. They
never spoke of their friendship ; it was not the way of
either of them; it is only yom' loving ladies who
lavish eternal vows, and press soft kisses on each
other's cheeks, and sw^ear they cannot live apart over
their pre-prandial Souchong, to slander each other
suavely behind their fans an hour afterwards, and
sigh away their bosom-darling's reputation with a
whisper! They rarely spoke of it; but they had a
friendship for one another passing the love of women,
and they relied on it as men rely on their own honour,
as silently and as securely.
Once, when they w^ere together in Scinde, having
both gone thither on a hunting trip to the big-
game districts for a change one autumn, to bring
home panther-skins and try pig-stickmg, a tigress
sprang out on them as they strolled alone through
the jmigle sprang out to alight, with grip and
UNDER THE SHADOW OF THE ELMS. 27
fang, upon Stratlimore, who neither heard nor saw
her, as it chanced. But before she could be upon
her victim, ErroU threw himself before him, and
catching the beast by her throat as she rose in the air
to her leap, held her off at arm's length, and fell with
her, holding her down by main force, while she tore
and gored him in the struggle a struggle that lasted
till Strathmore had time to take aim, and send a
ball through her brain ; a long time, let me tell you,
though but a few short seconds in actual duration, to
hold down, and to wrestle in the grip of a tigress of
Scinde. " You would have done the same for me, my
dear old fellow," said ErroU, quietly and lazily, as his
eyes closed, and he fainted away from the loss of
blood. And that was all he would ever vouchsafe to
say or hear said about the matter. He had risked his
life to save Strathmore's ; he knew Strathmore would
have acted precisely so for him. It was a type of the
quality and of the character of their friendship.
The evening shadows were slanting across the
sward, while the squirrels ran from branch to branch,
and the cheshuts lying on the mass turned to gold in
the western sun, as Strathmore walked along with a
couple of beagles following in his track. See Erroll
he did not, and he wondered where the deuce he had
gone ; if he had been absolutely after the rabbits he
would have taken some of the men, or the dogs at the
least, with him; and it was odd he had chosen that
night in especial to be belated, as among the people
28 STEATHMOBE.
coming to dine at White Ladies in an hour's time
was Lady Milhcent Clinton, a beautiful blonde, tan-
talising, imperious, and bewitching to the highest
degree, whom ErroU had watched for at Flirta-
tion Corner, left the coulisses for at the opera,
bought guinea cups of tea for at bazaars, and de-
dicated himself to generally, throughout the past
season. He walked onwards, flushing the phea-
sants with his step, and startling the herons as he
passed the pools, till they rose at the bark of the dogs,
and sailed majestically away in the sunny silent air.
At last, as he went along the confines of the deer-
park, towards the entrance of a long elm-walk, half
lane, half avenue, that led round towards the Abbey,
he saw, leaning over a gate against which his gun
was resting, and talking to a woman, Bertie in quest
of other game than the rabbits.
He was at some distance, almost at the other end of
the avenue; across which broad lines of yellow light fell
through the trunks of the trees, while the elm-boughs
meeting above head, thick with luxuriant leaf, threw
chequered shadows on the turf below. He was stand-
ing by the stile which led into a bridle-path that
wound up to the church a mile or so beyond, and
was talking earnestly to his companion, who stood on
the other side, and who, even at that distance, made
a charming picture ; much such a one as Aline, when
Boufflers toyed with her at the woodland brook under
the forests of Lorraine, with the butterflies fluttering
i
UNDEE THE SHADOW OF THE ELMS. 29
above her head, and the wild flowers hanging in her
childish hands. She stood on the lower step of the
stile, so that as she reached upwards one of her arms
was wound about his neck, her face, soft, youthful,
and fair, was lifted to his own, as his hand lingered
on her brow, pushing back from it the shining waves
of hair, while she nestled closely to him as a bird to
the one who caresses it, as a spaniel to the master it
follows ! It was a scene to be interpreted at a glance,
that golden sunset hour under the shadow of the
elms; and in those hours who remembers that the
sun will set, leaving the dank dews of night to brood
where its beams have fallen ; that the foliage above
us will drop off sere and withered like the " dark
brown years" of Ossian, into which we must enter
and dwell ; that in the grasses the asp is curling, that
in the west the clouds are brooding? None remem-
ber, mes amis ! neither did those who lingered then
beneath the elms before the sun went down.
" That's his game ! By George ! I thought it was
odd if the rabbits alone made him too late for dinner !
I wonder how many he has shot in the coppice. Poor
Lady Millicent ! she would die of mortification and
pique," thought Strathmore, as he looked up the elm-
walk at its crossed light and shade, with a smile in
which there was a dash of contempt. He had been
loved by women who might well have claimed to
haunt his memory; proud, peerless beauties, who
might well have looked to rouse the swift imperious
30 STEATHMOKE.
passion which, wlwi they loved that unloving race !
the love of the Strathmores had ever been ; but he
had cared for none of them, and this wasting of
hours, this ceaseless adoration of women, this worship-
ping of a mistress's eyebrow, was incomprehensible
and somewhat contemptible in his sight. He never
was so nearly losing patience with Erroll as when he
came in evidence with the perpetual gallantries, the
never-ending, ever-changing grandes passions y as easily
lit as cigars and as quickly thrown aside, that were
characteristic of the Sabreur, and his best beloved
pursuit. Strathmore would as soon have understood
consuming his time in constantly blowing soap-
bubbles ! he looked now with a certain disdainful
amusement at them where they stood ; then, unseen
himself, he turned, and making the dogs quiet with
a sign, crossed the avenue, and went along beside the
sunken fence of the deer-park by another route home-
ward, so that he should neither spy upon nor inter-
rupt them.
Such game was ErrolFs especial sport, if he found
it on the lands of White Ladies he was fully wel-
come to the preserves undisputed. Strathmore did
not envy him either the small amusement of slaying,
or the inevitable trouble of the game when slain ! A
quarter of an hour later on, as he crossed the lawns
that lay in front of the Abbey, while the chimes of
the bells were still ringing the curfew with low
mellow chants and carillons, he heard a step behind
UNDER THE SHADOW OF THE ELMS. 31
him, and as lie turned faced tlie Sabreur, who came
along smoking, blandly unconscious that he had been
seen in his tete-a-tete under the elms.
" Had good sport in the coppice, mon cher ? What
did you mean by giving us the slip like this ? " said
Strathmore, as he swung round and waited for him.
" Pretty good ; rabbits were rather shy," answered
En'oU, with the meerschaum between his lips, and
the most tranquil air of innocence that the human
countenance ever wore.
"But la belle wasnt! you seemed veiy good
friends; is she an old acquaintance or a new? Is
the game in the bag or only marked ; hit or only just
flushed ? I expect the whole story in the smoking-
room to-night ! "
A certain dash of annoyance and discomfiture went
over Erroll's face for the moment, but he laughed :
" Hang you ! where did you see me ? "
" Where you were very plainly to be seen ! If
you make open-air rendezvous, Bertie, you must
be prepared for spectators. Who is she? If the
game's been found on my lands, I think it is fair I
should have an account of it. Is she an old love or
a new ? "
" Not new," laughed the Sabreur, pulling his Glen-
garry over his forehead, to keep the sunset glare out
of his eyes.
" Not new ! I thought you gave no more thought
to old loves than to old gloves the gloss off both,
32 STEATHMOKE.
both go to the devil ! I suppose you found her up
last autumn, when you were down here in my place ?
I was in the East, so I am not responsible for what
happened ! You might have told me, my dear fellow ;
I shouldn't have rivalled you ; pretty peasants never
had any attraction for me ; I like the tourneure of the
world, not the odour of the dairy. Give me grace
and wit, not rosy cheeks and fingers fresh from the
churn and the hencoop ; the perfume of frangipane,
not of the farm-yard. Petrarch might adore a miller's
wife it is not my line and I think the flour must
have made Laura's ^ cJiiome (Toro' look dusty : I
never took a mistress from my tenantry! Who is
she, Errolir'
ErroU sent a puff of smoke into the air, and turned
to Strathmore with his gay insouciant laugh, clear as
a bell and sweet as a girl's, that had so much youth
in it:
"I'll tell you some other time. Old story, you
know, nothing new in it. We're all fools about
women, and she beats any of those we shall have to-
night hollow. Lady Millicent and all of 'em !"
Strathmore raised his eyebrows :
" An old love ! and you're as enthusiastic as that ?
What must you have been in the beginning ! Thank
Heaven I was not here. Poor Lady Millicent ! sal
volatile by the gallon would never restore her if she
knew a young provincial, smelling of the hayfield,
with a set of cherry ribbons for a Sunday, and a week-
day aroma of the cowshed (if not the pigsty), was
UNDER THE SHADOW OF THE ELMS. 33
said by the difficile Sabreur to beat her hollow ! and
she a Court beauty and a Lady in Waiting ! So much
for taste!"
"Pigsty? Cowshed? You didn't see her just
now, Cecil; you couldn't!" broke in Bertie, dis-
gusted.
"I saw a woman, my dear Erroll; she was your
property, and I noticed no more."
"For God's sake don't suppose me such a Goth
that I should fall in love with a dairymaid. Strath!"
said Erroll, plaintively. " She's nothing of that sort
nothing, I give you my honour ! Let me clear my
character, pray. Should I love a ^ PhiUis in a hazel-
bower?' I hate cobwebs, dew, and earwigs; and I
can't bear a coarse colour for a woman ! I say, don't
let out anything about it, though, will you ? Don't
tell the other fellows ; there's no object, and they'd
only "
"Chaff you? Exactly!"
" No ! I don't care a straw for chaff," said Erroll,
meditatively. "It's only boys who mind chaff, we
don't. But they might get hunting her out, you see
would, I dare say, / should in then- place and I
don't want that. I wish to keep the thing quiet. I
have managed to do it hitherto ; and she would cut up
as rough at insult as Lady Millicent herself ; you un-
derstand?"
"Not very clearly; but it doesn't matter; one
doesn't look for perspicuity in love intrigues nor for
reason."
VOL. I. D
34 STEATHMOEE.
" Hang you ! you know what I mean," miu'mured
the Sabreur, lazily.
"You mean, you don't want me to tell of your
tete-a-tete, and set the men on to badger you about it
when the women are gone ? Yery well ! I'm silent
as the dead !" laughed Strathmore, "What a wicked
dog^ you are, Bertie, on my word, though. Country
air ought to purify your morals ; one naturally sins in
cities, but "
" Inevitably sins in villages ! Just so, one's nothing
else to do ! In town, one sins from sociability ; in
the country, from solitariness a safe indication that
the soft sins are the natural concomitants of one's
existence everywhere, and shouldn't be resisted !"
"Admirable theory! developed in practice, too,
by its preacher, which can't be said o.f all precepts.
Arcadia and the Eue Breda have more in common
than one generally fancied then ; but I shouldn't have
thought youdi. have taken to provincial amourettes,
Sabreur ! However, failing hot-house fruits, I sup-
pose you take a turn at blackberries ? What an odd
state oif existence it must be, not to be able to live
twenty-four hours without finding some woman's eyes
to look into !"
" Yery natural, I think ! when women's eyes are
the pleasantest mirrors there are, and framed on
purpose for us. You were never in love in your life,
Strath."
" I was never the fool of a woman, if you mean
that."
UNDER THE SHADOW OF THE ELMS. 35
" You've brougiit over a prima donna, because, in
a cold sort of way, you thought her a handsome
Roman," went on Erroll, disdaining the interruption
"or you've taken up the Montolieu, because she
made a dead set at you ; and because one has a Mon-
toHeu as naturally as one has a cigar-case or a pair of
slippers or you've made love to some grande dame
because it answered a political purpose, and advanced
a finesse to be in her boudoir when everybody else was
shut out of it; but as for love you know nothing
about it!"
Strathmore laughed:
" I know as much as any wise man knows. I know
just as much as flavours life any more disturbs it.
I like a woman for her beauty, but I should be par-
ticularly sorry to sup in raptures oif a single smile, to
tie my hands with a golden hair, and to go mad after
the shape of an ankle, as you do with a dozen divinities
in as many months. A week or two ' ago you were
wild about the Clinton, who is worth looking at, I
grant you, and now, I dare say, you've lost your head
just as completely for little Phillis yonder, with her
hands in the butter ! My dear Bertie, it's positively
inexplicable to me ; I can fancy your kissing the lips,
if they're pretty ones, of all those goddesses, but I
can't possibly understand your caring about the god-
desses themselves !"
" Hold your tongue ! and, for Heaven's sake, don't
suppose I'm in love with a human churn ! Hands in
D 2
36 STEATHMOEE.
the butter; what an idea!" murmured the Sabreur,
disgusted.
" Well ! it must be a cabbage-rose this time, con-
servatory ones don't grow about the home farms. Or
if it isn't "
Strathmore stopped, struck with a sudden thought,
and swung round, as they walked under the cloisters,
his face as he turned to Erroll softening with that
smile which took from it all that was cold, dark, and
dangerous in its physiognomy, and gave to it an almost
tender warmth a warmth that as yet no woman had
had the magic to waken there. He laid his hand on
Erroll's shoulder with the old familiar gesture of their
Eton days, as they came out of the aisles of the
cloisters on to the lawn that stretched smooth and
sunny before an antique grey terrace, with broad
flights of steps hung with ivy, looking down on to
thick avenues and long glades of trees, like the terrace
at Haddon, where Dorothy Yernon fled in the summer
moonlight to the love of John Manners.
"Erroll, I say, it is no entanglement, no annoy-
ance, is it, this affair of yours ? "
Erroll threw his cigar away, shook his head, and
laughed :
" Not in the least ; except that my conscience
smites me a little for it sometimes. That's all ! "
Strathmore's hand rested still on his shoulder, lying J
there in the safe, cordial grasp of a friendship warm
as the friendship of David for Jonathan.
A
UNDER THE SHADOW OF THE ELMS. 37
" Conscience ! How exceptional you are ! The
word's out of all modern dictionaries, and rococo from
use. But what I meant was, if you had any diffi-
culty of any kind if you need to shake yourself free
from any embarrassments you would keep to your
promise and let me serve you in all ways ? Remem-
ber, old fellow, you gave me your word ? "
He meant that Erroll would let him assist him
more substantially than by advice. The Sabreur was
a man about town, with little more to float him than
a good name and a fashionable reputation, lucky
Baden "coups" and dashed-off magazine articles;
his debts were heavy sometimes, his embarrassments
not a few, though on his gay sunny nature they
never weighed long ; he was, very literally, a " beg-
gared gentleman," though his beggary was as joyous
and insouciant a Bohemianism as might be; and
Strathmore, who was generous to an extreme, and
ascetically indifferent to riches, had always pressed
him, and sometimes, though generally with the ut-
most difficulty, compelled him to accept his aid;
without bond or payment.
His hand lay on Erroll's shoulder where they stood
at the foot of the terrace steps, and the light from the
west fell full upon his face as Strathmore looked at
him it was so frank, so glad, with a smile as bright
as a girl's upon it, that many years afterwards Strath-
more saw it in memory fresh as though beheld but
yesterday.
38 STEATHMORE.
" Dear old fellow ! I know you would ! If I
needed, I would ask you as freely as though you
were my brother ;" and ErrolFs voice was rich and
full as he spoke, like the voice of a woman when she
speaks of, or to, that which she loves : then he laughed
with the gay carelessness of his temper. " But there's
no need here ; /'m not the sufferer. They are not
panther griffes, like your Montolieu's or La Julia's,
confound her ! I play the tiger part if there be one
in the duo. I say, Strathmore, what a confounded
bore your going off to Servia Bosnia, Bulgaria,
where is it ? Won't Prince Michel wait ? "
" Prince Michel would willingly wait till doomsday
rather than see me, but the F. O. won't. It is a
bore ; I didn't want to leave till over the First ; how-
ever, diplomatie oblige I and there'll be a good deal of
finesse wanted. It is an errand quite to my taste."
"Perhaps you'll see this adorable Vavasour and
Vaux beauty on the Continent. Do tiy ! "
"And report her to you, as game worth your
coming over to mark or not, as the case may be?
You paysanne w^on't hold her ground long against the
Peeress, if she's only a tithe of what Hokeby says. I
will make note for you accurately if I see her ; and
I may come back through Paris in the spring. The
deuce ! it's getting very late. Those people will all
be here before we are dressed for dinner," said Strath-
more, as he crossed the terrace, entered the house, and
went up to his dressing-room that looked out across
the pleasaunce and the deer-park that lay beyond.
UNDER THE SHADOW OF THE ELMS. 39
Lady Millicent came, haughty, lovely, and be-
witching, with the Harewood people and several
others, to dinner that night at White Ladies, in the
great dining-hall that had been the refectory of the
old Dominicans. Where travel-worn pilgrims and
serge-clothed palmers, footsore and bronzed by Eastern
suns, had sat and supped, telling of miracles of Lo-
retto or persecutions from the Moslem to the listen-
ing brethren, pretty women with diamonds glancing
in tlieir hair, and smiles brightening in their languid,
lustrous eyes, sat at the table, covered with gold
plate, and Bohemian glass and delicate Sevres, with
rich fruits and brilliant exotics, and Parian figures,
holding up baskets odorous with summer blossom,
while the wines sparkled pink and golden in their
carafes, and flushed to warm, ruby tints in the silver
claret-jugs. Where the white robes of the Domini-
cans had swept, the perfumed laces and silks of their
trailing dresses as noiselessly moved ; where the Latin
chant of the Salutaris Hostia had risen and swelled,
the low laugh of. their musical voices echoed ; where
the incense had floated in purple clouds, the bouquet
of Burgundies and the perfume of Millefleurs scented
the air ; where the silent monks had sat and broken
black bread in the monarchical gloom of their wood-
land Abbey, Lady Millicent and her sisters flirted
and smiled, and brushed the bloom off a hothouse
grape, and trifled with the wing of an ortolan, while
the light flashed azure-bright in thek sapphires, and
the opals gleamed in their bosom. Le Eoi est mort.
40 STEATHMOEE.
Vive le Roi ! So To-day succeeds to Yesterday, and
the dead are supplanted and the past is forgot !
Where the ^daticum last night was administered to
the dying, the laugh of the living echoes gaily this
morning, and in its turn the laugh will die off the
air, and the chant of the tomb will come round again.
Such is life and such is death, and the two are ever
fused together and twisted in one inseparable cord,
the white line running with the black, side by side,
crossed and recrossed, following each other as the
night the day !
"You incorrigible fellow, what would your wood-
nymph have said to you if she'd seen you making
such desperate love to Lady Millicent to-night ? "
said Strathmore, as he and Erroll passed down the
corridor to the smoking-room, as the last roll of the
carriages echoed down the avenue.
"The deuce!" laughed Erroll. "If they had a
lorgnon long enough to let them see any of us when
we're away from them, the tamest Griseldis would
have little to say to us when we went back to her !
Those poor women ! they're shockingly cheated."
"They have their revenge, mon cher. If we're
their first instructors in mischief, they take to the
lesson very kindly, and improve on it fast enough ! "
laughed Strathmore. " If M. son Mari deceive
Lucretia, Lucretia soon turns the tables, and dupes
her lord. They are quits with us, and don't want
any pity. I wish your luckless wood-nymph had
seen you go on with the Clinton to-night ! I am
TJNDEE THE SHADOW OF THE ELMS. 41
curious really to know liow you get up the steam fresh
every time; now with a duchess, and now with a
dairymaid, now with a blonde, and now with a brune ! "
" Afin de varier les couleurs !"
quoted Erroll, appropriately, wrapping about him his
seed-pearl broidered and sable-lined dressing-gown,
dainty and costly enough for Lady Millicent's wear.
" Caramba ! " broke in Strathmore. " I have a good
mind to punish your inconstancy by betraying your
incognita. Such a monopoly of the wild game and
the tame birds at once isn't fair. I'll tell Danvers the
whereabouts of your preserves."
"No, no! Don't! there's a good fellow," inter-
rupted Erroll, quickly. "You see it would only
bother one and "
Strathmore laughed as he opened the door of the
smoking-room, and the flood of warm light streamed
out from within :
"We don't like poaching in neglected preserves
even ! I understand, my dear fellow. Bag your big
game and your small, make love to your Court belle
and your country girl both at once, and just as you
like ! / won't set the beaters after either. Have I
not said I'll be silent as death ? Entrez ! Bah ! there
is Phil smoking those wretched musk-scented cigarettes
again ; they are only fit for Lady Georgie or Eulalie
Papellori. What taste, when there are my Havannahs
and cheroots ! "
42
CHAPTER III.
THE VIGIL OF ST. JOHN.
It was the Vigil of St. Joliii in Prague.
The stars were coming out one by one m the clear
violet skies, that were still yellow in the west with the
beams of a setting sun ; and the dews of the evening
were moist upon the thick foliage of the Lorenziberg
and the vineyards of the Anlagen, encircling the city
with their fresh green zone. The lights, already lit
upon the bridges, were mirrored in the waters of the
Moldau, or the Yeltava, as it is called by its softer
Czeschen name, that ran like a broad smooth silver
band beneath their arches; and the glare from the
western skies fell on the gilt crosses of the Teyn
church, making them blaze and sparkle with fiery
brilliance, while the mosque-like spires of a thousand
towers stood out clear and delicate as fairy handiwork
in the warm golden haze, as the measured chant of
litanies, sung by gathered multitudes, rose and fell
with slow sonorous rhythm on the hush of the coming
THE VIGIL OF ST. JOHN. 43
niglit. For many nights and days before, tlie hum of
collecting people and the weary tramp of tired feet
had been heard throughout the city, as devotees
of every stock and province had flocked far and
near, from wild Silesian forests, from remote Ba-
varian mountains, from Saxon hamlets buried in their
pine-woods, and charcoal-burners' chalets in Molda-
vian wilds, and Czeschen homesteads nestled in their
cherry orchards, to tlie great Festival of Holy Jo-
hannes of Nepomiik, at whose most sainted martyr-
dom, as Legend and Church record, five stars arose
and glittered in the waters where the Saint sank, a
thousand years ago, and gleamed in golden radiance?
heaven-sent witnesses to innocence.
At the Cathedral and in the Platz, before the
stars and statue on the bridge, and arou.nd the
bronze ring in St. Wenzel's Chapel, at every smaller
shrine and lesser altar through the city, the dense
crowd of pilgrims knelt, all their heads bowed
down in prayer, as the numberless ears of wheat
in a corn-field bend with one accord before the
sweep of a summer breeze. There is something
oddly touching, pathetic, majestic, almost sacred in
the sight of a surging sea of human life I What is it
that is grand and impressive in a dense silent crowd,
collected together, no matter whether that crowd be a
mass of troops in the Champ de Mars, the gathering
of the people upon Epsom Downs, or a countless as-
sembling of peasants in Prague on a Holy day ? What
is it ? Taken individually, the units of each are un-
44 STRATHMOEE.
impressive, grotesque, common-place ; a French chas-
seur, an English touter, a Sclavonian glass engraver,
have no sublimity about them taken singly. But in
their aggregate, there is that same strange, nameless,
mournful solemnity which brought hot, unbidden tears
to the eyes of the man who, while the Magi offered
libations to the manes of the Homeric heroes, sat on
the white throne at Abydos, looking down on the
crowded Hellespont, and the countless thousands that
were gathered by the shores of Scamander, beneath
the shadow of Mount Ida, while the sunlight glittered
on the golden pomegranates of the Immortal Guard,
and the gorgeous robes of the Thracians fluttered in
the winds. Perhaps with him, we vaguely, unwit-
tingly, involuntarily compassionate these vast multi-
tudes, of which in a century there will not be one who
has not been gathered to his tomb ; and the depth of
the sadness lends a sanctity to these crowds, whose
goal is the grave, which the chill and shallow philoso-
phies of an Artabanus cannot whisper away : for we
too are wending thither in their company, we too must
turn our steps from golden Abydos, and lay us down
to die at Salamis !
It was the Yigil of St. John. Pyramids of gas-jets
flared up to the skies, the Five Stars commemorative
of the Saint of Nepomiik glittered on the parapet in
the evening air : there was no sound but the swelling
melodious cadence of the Latin litanies, chanted by a
million voices in solemn and regular rhythm, filling
the night with music, full, rich, mournful as the
THE VIGIL OF ST. JOHN. 45
glorious harmonies that peal from cathedral c^ioirs
at a midnight mass. And an Englishman strolling
through the city on foot (for no carriages are per-
mitted in the Platz and Bridge at tlie Vigil and Fes-
tival of St. John), looked dowii on the kneeling
multitudes with a smile on his lips, a smile that had
perhaps a little of the sadness of the Persian as he
gazed down on the ^gean, and more of natural dis-
dain for these superstitions before him, which were
but type of the bigotries of a wider world, where
difference from him is your neighbour's measure of
your difference from Deity, and where we are bidden
to accept our creed, as in the time of the Molinistes
they were bidden to accept the Pouvoir Prochain, by
no better rule than that " il f aut prononcer le mot des
levres de peur d'etre heretique de nom ! "
As he strolled down Wenzel's Platz, in the centre
of which sprang a tree of gas, with a myriad of
burning luminous leaves, that threw their glare
on the kneeling devotees as they bowed in adora-
tion before the holy shrines, a carriage that had
come into the square against all rule for the best
reason, that the horses had broken away, frightened
at the music, the lights, the crowds, and had taken
their own way thither, beyond their driver's power to
pull them in dashed down the Platz at a headlong
gallop. The crowd of pilgrims w^ere too densely packed
to have power to move to save themselves by separa-
tion or by flight ; they fell pele-mele one on another,
the stronger crushing the weaker, according to custom
46 STPtATHMOEE.
in every conflict, calling on Jesns and the Mother of
God and Holy Johannes to preserve them from their
fate, shrieking, praying, sobbing, swearing ; while the
horses, maddened by the tnmnlt and the gas glare,
tore across the square, dragging their carriage after
them like a wicker toy. Nothing less than a heavenly
interposition, miraculously great as the Five Stars of
Holy Johannes, could save the people in tlieir path
from death and destruction ; the carriage rocked and
swayed, its occupant clasping her hands and crying
piteously for help ; the horses dashed through the
kneeling multitude, knocking down aged men and
sobbing children and shrieking women in their head-
long course ; the oaths and prayers and screams rose
loud and shrill, half drowned in the rich sonorous
chant of the litanies from priests and pilgrims beyond,
that swelled out uninterrupted from every lighted
shrine and blazing altar.
Death was imminent for many death in the hour
of prayer, death on the eve of glad festivity ; the
horses, snorting, plunging, flinging the white foam
from their nostrils, trampled out a merciless path
through the close-packed crowd, and trod down be-
neath their hoofs Avhat they could not scatter from
their road. The blaze of gas, the loud swell of the
chants, the glitter of the altar lights, the wild tumult
and uproar about them, terrified and maddened them.
Death was in their van, and in their wake, for all the
multitude kneeling there in prayer; but as they
neared the spot where the Enghshman was, who had
THE VIGIL OF ST. JOHN. 47
not moved a yard, and calmly waited tlieir approach,
he stood firmly planted, as though made of granite,
in their path, and catching them, with a sudden
spring, by their ribbons close to the curb, checked
them in full flight with a force that sent them back
upon their haunches. It needed what he had, an
iron strength and perfect coolness ; even with these
to aid him it was a dangerous risk to run, for if they
shook themselves free, the infuriated beasts would
trample him to death.
They reared and plunged wildly, flinging the
foam, tinged with blood, over their chests and
flanks, and into his eyes, till it blinded him with
the spray ; they lifted him three times up off the
ground by his wrists with a jerk suflicient to
wrench his arms out of their sockets, with a strain
enough to make every fibre and muscle break and
snap. Still he held on ; they had met their master,
and had to give in at last ; they were powerless to
shake off his grip ; and, tired out at last "vvith the
contest, they stood quiet ; panting, trembling, passive,
fairly broken in, their heads drooping, their limbs
quivering, blood where the curbs had sawn their
mouths, mixed with the snowy foam that covered
them from their loins to their pasterns. He let go
his hold ; his face was pale, and calm, as though he
had lounged out of a ball-room ; but his eyes glittered
and gleamed dark with a swift, dangerous passion a
passion that was evil. He stretched his hand up,
without speaking, to the coachman for his whip ; the
48 STEATHMOKE.
man stooped down and gave it to him ; and, clearing the
crowd wide with a sign, he lashed the horses, pitilessly,
fiercely ^lashed them till the poor brutes, spiritless,
powerless, and trembling, stood shaking like culprits
before their judge. That merciless punishing done,
his passion had spent itself ; the horses were broken
down to the quietness of lambs, and might have been
guided by a young child ; letting go his hold on them
again, he approached the carriage window, and lifted
his hat as carelessly and indifferently as though he
were bowing to some acquaintance in the Ride or the
Pre Catalan.
" Madame, you must be very much terrified, but I
trust you have not been hurt ? " he said, in German,
to the single occupant of the carriage, who, lean-
ing out, eagerly, and with grateful empressement,
stretched to him two delicate, ungloved, jewelled
hands.
^'Monsieur! Mon Dieu! how brave you have
been ! You have saved my life and at the risk of
your own ! What can I say to you ? How can I
thank you?"
As the glare from the gas-pyramid near and the
lights burning on the shrine fell upon her face, he
saw that it was one of rare and exceeding loveliness,
and smiled slightly as her warm white hands touched
his own, that were aching and throbbing with pain :
"Madame, I am thanked already par un regard
de vous ! Is there any way in which I can have the
honour to assist you ? "
THE VIGIL OF ST. JOHN. 49
Before she could reply, the carriage moved. The
driver, a rough, ill-mannered Czec, who wasted no
words and no time, started off his trembling horses
afresh; he was impatient to be out of the crowd,
who, recovering from their terror, were swearing bit-
terly at him in a hundred guttural dialects, and
screaming vociferous indignant wrath ; and he was
afraid, moreover, of the arrival and the fury of
police officials. Without awaiting orders, he started
off back again through the square, and the carriage
rolled away down the Platz, bearing its occupant out
of sight ; a broidered handkerchief she had dropped,
as her hand met her deliverer's, was the only relic
left of her, where it lay on the stones at his feet.
The pilgrims, closing over the vacant spot as the
vehicle rolled away, crowded round the English-
man who had saved two-thirds of them from im-
minent death, with impetuous, demonstrative, en-
thusiastic gratitude, the vivacious Sclavonians call-
ing on the Mother of God and Holy Johannes
to bless and reward him, showering down on him
a thousand valedictions in harsh Saxon and ve-
hement Czeschen; the women holding up their
children to look at him, and remember his face, and
pray for him for ever ; the terrified peasants kissing
his clothes in frantic adoration, canonising him then
and there, and calling down upon his head the
blessing of the whole heavenly roll of saints and
angels; while through the multitude ran a breath-
less whisper, that their deliverer was none other than
VOL. I. E
50 STEATHMOEE.
St. John of Nepomiik himself, descended on earth in
human form to save and champion his faithful
people, keeping watch and prayer at his Vigil in
Prague !
To be canonised was very far from his taste, and
the vehement gratitude lavished upon him was an in-
finite bore. The vociferous worship of the crowds
could very well have been dispensed with, and signing
them off to leave him a clear path, he pushed them
away, and breaking free from their eager clamour
mth some difficulty, he walked down the Platz,
striking a fusee and lighting a cigar as he went an
act that slightly disturbed the pilgrims who had ca-
nonised him, and shook their faith as to his saintship :
Holy Johannes would never have smoked !
As he moved from the spot, he saw the handkerchief
lying at his feet, and stooped and raised it ; it was of
gossamer texture, bordered with delicate lace ; it was
subtilely perfumed, and in the corner, broidered with
fantastic device, was a coronet and an interlaced
chiffre, whose initials were too intricately interwoven
for him to be at the pains to decipher them. It was
a woman's pretty toy ; some men would have kept it
in souvenir of this Vigil of St. John when a face so
marvellously lovely had beamed upon them ; he was
not one of those ; it was not his way. For a moment
he took it up to thrust it in the breast of his waist-
coat, more without thought than from any motive in
the action ; but as he did so he was passing a pretty
Bohemian glass-engraver, whose bright black eyes
THE VIGIL OF ST. JOHN. 51
sparkled with eager longing as lier pretty brunette's
face looked out from lier yellow hood, and she saw
the dainty scented handkerchief in his hand. He
threw it to her, dropping the little gossamer toy, with
its broidered coronet, into her bosom.
" It will please you better than me, little beauty," he
said cai'elessly, as he went on through the thickly-
packed crowd, sriioking, and not taking in return the
caress she would willingly have allowed; as the pilgrims
returned to their prayers, closing over the vacant spot,
and the chanted orisons, broken off for a while, rose
again in slow-measured harmonies, the litanies ring-
ing out into the silent air, the lights bm-ning on the
blazing altars, and the dense crowds bowing do^vii
before the shrines throughout the city, while the
golden cross of the Teyn church glittered in the
light of the stars, and the hushed skies brooded in the
twihght of the coming night over the towers and the
palaces, the river and the vineyards, the lighted altars,
and the frowning fortresses of antique and historic
Prague.
e2
52 STKATHMOKE.
CHAPTER lY.
A TITIAN PICTUEE SEEN BY SUNSET-LIGHT.
"MoUTON qui reve, are you thinking of Prague
and of me ? "
A cumbersome Czeschen boat was dropping down
the Moldau, its sails idly flapping in the sultry June
night, in which not a breath of wind was stirring,
while the mournful music of some of the national lays
broke on the air from a little band of musicians play-
ing in the aft of the vessel, wild, sweet, and har-
monious, as though they were the melodies of le-
gendary Rubezahl and his Spirit Band. The boat
was chiefly filled with peasantry going by water to a
fair at Auzig, and bright-eyed glass-engravers, with
yellow or scarlet kerchiefs on their black-haired heads,
were laughing merrily with each other, and casting
mischievous glances at the sailors as they passed
them. It was such a summer night as you may see
any year in Bohemia ; the lazy, silent hour when the
A TITIAN PICTUEE. 53
hot, toilsome, blazing day is sinking into the warm,
still, tranquil night; when the peasantry leave their
field-work, chanting fragments of the Niebelungen-
lied, or some other Sclavonic song ; when the en-
gravers put aside their little graving-wheels, and lean
out for a breath of air from their single window
under the eaves; when the cattle wind homeward
down the hill-side paths, and in the doorways of the
Gasthof, under the cherry-trees, the gossipers drink
their good-night draughts of Lager and Bayerisches.
The orchards, white with blossom, bowered gaily-
painted homesteads; the dark red roofs peeped out
of chalets half hidden under hollyhocks ; the poppy
grounds glowed scarlet, catching the last gleam of the
setting sun ; and over the rye-fields a low western
breeze was blowing from the fir-covered hills as the
vessel floated down the stream, passing green wooded
creeks, and pine-woods growing between the clefts of
riven rocks, and golden glimpses of hazy distance
from the banks through which the Moldau wound its
way.
"Mouton qui reve, are you thinking of Prague
and of me, mon ami?"
The voice was low, and sweet, and rich that most
excellent thing in woman ; and the speaker was
worthy the voice, where she sat leaning amongst a
pile of shawls and cushions with which her servant
had covered the rough bench of the boat, as an
Odalisque might have leaned amongst the couches
of the Oda, with as much Eastern grace and as much
54 STRATHMOEE.
Eastern languor. A Monde aux yeux oiows, her eyes
were long and dark and lustrous, with a dangerous
droop of their thick curling lashes, but her skin was
dazzlingly fair, with a delicate bloom in her cheeks ;
the hair was not golden, nor auburn, nor blond
cendre, but what I have only seen once in my
life, the "yellow hair" of the poets, of Edith the
Swan-necked, and of Laura of Avignon ; the lips
were beautiful a trifle too full and too sensual, femi-
nine detractors would have objected, but Beranger
would have sung of them :
pour ma l^vre qui les presse,
C'est un def aut bien attrayant !
and it was a mouth that surely smiled destruction !
It was a face, brilliant, tender, marvellously lovely
like a face of Titian or of Greuze, as she leant
among her cushions, with a black veil over her hair,
thrown there with the grace of a Spanish mantilla ;
and her white hands lying on the rough wooden edge
of the vessel, with their rings gleaming in the su.nset
glare. Her eyes were dwelling on the face of a man
who leant over the boat-side within a few yards of
her, and who was looking down into the water, a
cigar in his mouth, and his profile turned towards
her; dwelling with curiosity, admiration, satisfac-
tion. A woman appreciated better than a man the
peculiar and varied meanings of that physiognomy ;
women will not often see widely, but they always see
microscopically ; they cannot analyse, but they have
invariably rapid intuition.
I
A TITIAN PICTURE. 55
" It is a face of Vandyke ! so much repose, with
so much passion. I hke it. It tells a story, but a
story whose leaves are uncut," she thought to herself,
as she leaned foi'wards, touched his arm with a branch
of cherry-blossoms she held, and challenged him with
her laughing words, "Mouton qui reve !"
He turned ; he had not seen her there before, though
both had been on board some half hour ; and as the
light blow of the cherry-blossoms struck his arm, scat-
tering their snowy petals, and her low, soft laugh fell
on his ear, he recognised the face that he had seen
a few days before in the gas glare of the Vigil of St.
John, whose broidered handkerchief he had dropped
into the bosom of a Bohemian peasant girl, instead of
treasuring it in recollection of one so fair. Such a
woman would have won courteous welcome and re-
cognition from a Stagyrite or a nonogenarian ; and
he took the hand she extended to him soft, warm, and
small, with sapphu'es and pearls gleaming on its un
gloved fingers, lifting his hat to her with answering
words of gratified acknowledgments. He had not
been thinking of her, but Diogenes himself would
not have had discourtesy enough to have told her so ;
and on a summer's evening, dropping down a river in
a slow, tedious passage, such a rencontre to while
away the time could not choose but be acceptable to
any man.
^ Ah, monsieur ! " she said, softly, as he drew near
to her, " how brave you were that night. To dare to
stop those horses in full flight ! it was marvellous ; it
56 STRATHMORE.
was heroic ! You saved my life ; how can I ever
thank you well enough? ever show you half my
gratitude?"
" Hush, madame, I entreat you ! " he said, with a
smile, that was rather the calm conventional smile of
courtesy than the warmer one she was used to see
lighten at her glance. " You have thanked me abun-
dantly ; if you do more, you will make me ashamed
of having served you so little. Few men would not
envy me so rich a recompense as lies in having won
the smallest title to your gratitude !"
La blonde aux yeux noirs looked up at him search-
ingly through her silky lashes, and laughed a pretty,
mocking, airy laugh.
" Graceful words ! but are they meant V^
" Ah, madame ! " he answered, laughing, as he
seated himself beside the fair stranger, into whose
path accident had thrown him so agreeably. " Per-
haps that is a question that it is always wisest never
to ask of any words at all ! "
"What an odd man!" thought the lovely Oda-
lisque of the Moldau, letting her eyes rest on the
countenance that had for her, as it had for most
women, a peculiar fascination, while she laughed
again. " Very true ! Some women will tell you,
monsieur, they do not like compliments never be-
lieve them ; it is only that the grapes are sour. /
like flattery. I live on it as children live on bon-
bons; if it be not sincere, it is nothing to me, the
blame lies on the bad taste of the flatterers. I must
A TITIAN PICTUEE. 57
have my dragees, and, as long as they are sweet, what
matter whether they are real sugar or only French
chalk?"
"All offered to you must be genuine ^you need
have no fear !" he answered her and he meant it.
As he looked down on the dazzling incognita, whose
insouciant freedom had yet all the grace and charm
taught by the breeding of courts and beaux mondes,
though critical and very difficult to please, he con-
fessed to himself that he had never seen anything
more lovely out of the pastelles of La Tour, or the
dreams of Titian, than this young and brilliant crea-
tm-e found thus strangely out of place, and alone, in
a Bohemian boat that was carrying a load of peasant
passengers to Auzig Fair !
Who could she be ? a lady of rank, laissez f aire
and untrammelled, amusing herself with the romances
and caprices of a momentary incognita; a Princess
of the Tuileries, or of the Quartier Breda ; a Serene
Highness of some Sesquipedalian-Strelitz, sans state
and sans suite; or a Comtesse sans Chateaux (save
en Espagne), with a face and a grace more fatal to
her prey than her vin mosseux and her skilful ecarte ?
As yet it was impossible to tell, and with a lovely
woman so ungracious an interrogation can never be
put as the insolent question, " Wlio are you?"
She looked up and met his eyes bent on her, as the
light of the sun setting behind the pine-woods lit up
her face and form, as she leaned among her cushions,
into Reuben-like richness, with a bright touch of
58 STEATHMOEE.
Fra Angelo and Carlo Dolce softness about the
tableau.
" How strangely we meet, monsieur, on tliis clumsy
little Czeschen boat ! I came by water, because the
night was so warm ; and you came from the same
reason ? Ah ! Cest le destiny monsieur I We were
fated to meet again."
" If fate will always serve me as kindly I will be-
come a predestinarian to-morrow, and go in leading-
strings with blind contentment I"
God help us ! how rashly we say things in this
world. Long years afterwards we remember those
idle, careless, unmeant words gaily uttered, and they
come back to us like the distant mocking laughs of
devils ! devils who tempted us, and now riot in their
work.
" Cest le destin !" she said, smiling, her fair face,
with its luminous eyes, looking the lovelier for that
beaming coquettish smile. "But, monsieur, you
have been my deliverer, may I not ask to know,
who is it I have to thank for so daring a rescue as
I owed to you in Prague ? "
^' Assuredly. My name is Strathmore Cecil
Strathmore."
"Strathmore!" she repeated, musingly. "It is a
very pretty name, and a good one. Then you are
English, monsieur ? And if so, you are thinking, of
course, what a strange incorrect whim of mine it is
for me to be travelling alone with only my maid in a
A TITIAN PIOTUEE. 59
little Czeschen boat in the evening? You English
are so raides, so prudish !"
Strathmore laughed, as he wound the shawls about
her that had dropped aside.
"The English are (though I am neither of the
two, believe me), but they generally verify Swift's
aphorism, that ' a nice man is a man of nasty ideas ;'
the chill icing is only to conceal dirty water, and
they freeze to hide what lies below ! But may not I
claim similar confidence, and entreat to know by name
one for whom no name is needed, it is tnie, to make
one remember her ? "
She laughed, and shook her head in denial so
charming that it w^as worth fifty assents.
" No, I am travelling incognita. I cannot reveal
that secret. I like Romance and Caprice, monsieur,
they are feminine .privileges, and following them I
have found far more amusement than if I had gone
in one beaten track between two blank walls of
Custom and Prudence. It may have made me
enemies ; but, bah ! who goes through life without
them?"
" None ! and never those who awaken envy. Dul-
ness and mediocrity may live unmolested and un-
attacked, but people never tire of finding spots on a
sun whose brilliance blinds them."
" Never !" she answered, with a naive and amusing
personal appropriation of his words. " If I had been
born plain like some poor women, I should not have
60 . STEATHMOEE.
had so many siffleurs ; but then, on the other hand,
my claque woukl not have been so loud nor so strong ;
and the cheers always drown the hisses."
" You have had siffleurs ? They must have bandaged
their eyes, then, before taking so ungracious a role !
Surely society hissed tJiem for such atrocity ? " said
Strathmore, noticing the dazzling fairness of her skin
and the exquisite contour of her form, and thinking to
himself, " The deuce ! she makes me talk as absurd
nonsense as the Sabreur ! "
" Of course it did, but siffleurs hiss on through all
opposition, you know, monsieur "
" Because it pays them ! "
"No doubt. But, what do a few hisses matter,
more or less, as long as one enjoys oneself in one's
youth one's delicious, irrecoverable youth ? I sup-
pose if I live long enough my hair will be white and
my skin yellow, but I do not spoil my present by
looking into the future. If it must come, let it take
care of itself. It may never come why mourn about
it? Those people are becasses, who work, and toil,
and wear away all their good looks, and live hardly
and joylessly only to hoard money to buy tisane, and
nurses, and crutches, when all the zest of existence is
gone from them, and given to a new generation that
has pushed them out of their places ? Doesn't Balzac
say, that whether one sweeps the streets with a broom
or the Tuileries with a velvet robe, it comes to much
the same thing when one is old ; the salt is equally out
A TITIAN PICTUEE. 61
of the soup whether it is eaten in a Maison Dieu or in
a ducal chateau ! "
"Almost thou persuadest me to be an Epicurean !"
smiled Strathmore, as he thought to himself, "Who
on earth can she be ? " and gazed down into her soft,
laughing, lustrous eyes, languid yet coquettish, like
the eyes of the women of Seville. " But / do not hold
with you there, ma belle inconnue ; to me it seems that
with years alone can be gained what is worth gaining
power. The butterfly pleasure of youth can very
well be spared for the ambitions that can only be
reaped with maturity. A man has only become of
real value, and able to grasp real sway, when he is
near his grave ? "
" Ah, for your sex that is all very well, your youth
lasts to your tomb, but with us nous autres femmes !
with our beauty flies our sceptre. How can we
reign after youth, without youth ? You will not care
for a mistress who is wrinkled!" cried the belle
blonde, impatiently, the impatience of a lovely
coquette incensed to be contradicted. " So, you
think power the only thing worth having? Then
you do not care for love, monsieur, I presume ? "
" Well ! I must confess, not much."
It was rank heresy in the presence of so fair a
priestess of the soft religion, it was a fatal challenge
to the one who heard it, though Strathmore spoke the
cold, careless, simple truth, and did not heed whether
he offended or piqued a chance acquaintance of the
hour by it.
62 STEATHMOEE.
" And yet that man will love, fiercely, imperiously,
bitterly one day ! " thought the Neriad of the Moldau,
who, a stranger to him, as he to her, read his character
by a woman of the world's clairvoyante perception,
as he failed to read hers by a man of the world's
trained penetration. " For shame ! " she said, aloud,
striking him a fragrant blow with her sprigs of cherry-
blossom. "If you are heretical enough to feel so,
mon ami, you should not be unchivalric enough to say
so ! Your bay wreaths will be very barren and
withered if you don't weave some roses with them.
Caesar knew that. So you admire age because it will
give you power ; and I loathe it because it will rob
me of beauty what a difference! I wonder how
we shall both meet it ! But, bah ! why talk of these
things'? The wind will be chilly, and the green
leaves brown, and the ground frost-bound in six
months' time ; but the butterflies playing there above
our heads are too wise to spoil the sunshine by re-
membering the snows. They are Epicureans ; let us
be so too ! "
To such a doctrine, expounded by such lips, it was
impossible to dissent. The sunset faded, the purple
mists stole on down the slopes of the hills, the west
wind rose, bringing a rich odour from the pine forests ;
the Bohemian musicians, for a few coins, sang au's
sweet enough to have been played by the legendary
music-demons of a land where Mozart rules; the
boat dropped slowly down the stream in the evening
twilight, and Strathmore leant over the vessel's side,
A TITIAN PICTURE. 63
talking on to his chance acquaintance, and looking
down on to the exquisite Titian-like picture that she
made, reclining on her pile of cushions, with the black
mantilla of lace thrown on her yellow hau', and her
dark lustrous eyes gleaming softly and dreamily in
the light of the summer stars. He was singularly
critical of the beauty of women, and coldly careless of
their wiles and charms; yet even he felt a vague
dreamy pleasure in floating down the river in the
sultry moonlit night thus, with the echo of this sweet
silvery voice in his ear, and a face on which he looked
in the gloaming, soft as the music that lingered on the
silent air. He would not altogether have found the
voyage wearisome though it had lasted till the da^^^i ;
but pardieu, mes freres ! one never drops long down
any river, real or allegorical, w^ith a smooth current
and Arcadian landscapes, under the shade of pleasant
woodlands, beneath which we would w^illingiy linger
till sunrise, but that we are safe to be soon startled by
the rough grate of the keel on the sand, that breaks
the spell for evermore !
It was so now ; the boat ground in a shallow bit of
the water where red sunken rocks made the na\dga-
tion troublesome for a vessel so cumbersome, and
boatmen so clumsy, as were those who now steered it
down the Moldau's com'se. No harm was done that
could be of serious account, but the boat was stuck
hopelessly fast between the rocks, and could not pro-
ceed to Auzig that night, at all events ; while its pas-
sengers had no choice but to remain where they were
64 STKATHMORE.
till the sunrise, or to disembark at a landing-place
which was luckily easily to be reached by a plank be-
tween the vessel and the shore, where, buried in the
favourite cherry orchards of Bohemia, with a gaudy
sign swinging under its dark red roof, half hidden in
a profusion of giant hollyhocks, with linden-trees in
full flower before the door, and the pine-covered
hills stretching behind it, stood a little river-side
Gasthof. The unknown, into whose society and in
whose protection he was thus in a manner forced,
laughed brightly, and made light of the contretemps
when Strathmore explained it to her. "We must
wait here? very well ! I like the smallest soup9on
of an adventure. I will dine under those limes. I
suppose they can find something to give us ; but I
must go on to-night if there be a vehicle procurable,"
she said, gaily and good humom^edly enough, without
any feminine repining, as she gave him her hand to
be assisted across the plank.
She was not altogether sorry to be able to retain
as a detenu an English aristocrat, with a face like
the Vandyke pictures ; who was coldly indifferent to
the soft creeds of which she was a head-priestess, and
was a renegade and disbeliever in their faith. " Des-
tiny throws us together, monsieur ! We must be good
friends. Dieu le veut!" she laughed, as Strathmore
lifted her from the plank on to the landing-place,
while the white soft hands lay in his, and the delicate
fragrance of the perfumed hair floated across him, as
the lace of her mantilla brushed his shoulder.
A TITIAN PICTURE. 65
" I am the debtor of destiny, then ! " he whispered,
in answer, noting as she stood by him in the starlight
the sweet grace and luxurious outline of her perfect
form, that even the dark di'apery of her travelling-
dress, wrapped about in long voluminous folds, could
not avail to hide.
Brothers mine! it is well for us that we are no
seers ! Were we cursed with prevision, could we
know how, when the idle trifle of the present hour
shall have been forged into a link of the past, it will
stretch out and bind captive the wdiole future in its
bonds, we should be paralysed, hopeless, powerless,
old ere ever we were young ! It is well for us that we
are no seers. Were we cursed with second sight, we
should see the white shroud breast-high about the
living man, the phosphor light of death gleaming on
the youthful radiant face, the feathery seed lightly
sown bearing in it the germ of the upas-tree, the idle
careless word gaily uttered carrying in its womb the
future bane of a lifetime ; we should see these things
till we sickened, and reeled, and grew blind with pain
before the ghastly face of the Future, as men in
ancient days before the loathsome visage of the
Medusa !
VOL. I.
QQ
CHAPTER V.
THE BONNE-AVENTURE TOLD UNDER THE LINDENS.
Contretemps generally have some saving crumbs
of consolation for tliose who laugh at fate, and look
good humouredly for them ; life's only evil to him
who wears it awkwardly, and philosophic resignation,
works as many miracles as Harlequin ; grumble, and
you go to the dogs in a TVTetched style ; make mots on
your own misery, and you've no idea how pleasant a
trajet even drifting " to the bad " may become. So
when the Czeschen boat grated on the land and stuck
there, coming to grief generally and hopelessly, for-
tune was so propitiated by the radiant smile with
which its own scurvy trick was received by the love-
liest of all the balked travellers, that what would,
under any other circumstances, have been the most
provoking bore, became a little episode picturesque
and romantic, and took a couleur de Q^ose at once under
the resistless magic of her sunny smile. It was a
THE BONNE-A VENTURE. 67
beautiful night, starry, still, and sultry ; tlie river-side
inn stood like a picture of Ostade, hidden in its blos-
somed limes; the pine-woods stretched above and
around, with the ruddy gleam of gipsy fires flashing
between the boughs ; and with such a companion as
hazard had given him, Strathmore could hardly com-
plain of the accident, though he was a man who found
the gleam of women's eyes in a cabinet particulier of
a cafe, or a cabinet de toilette of a palace, far better
than in all the uncomfortably-romantic situations in
the world, and held that a little gallantry was in-
finitely more agreeable and rational in a rose-tendre-
hung chamber than a la belle ttoile in a damp mid-
night under the finest violet skies that ever enraptured
a poet.
The little hostelry was already full of travellers.
Some English en route to the waters of the Sprudel,
some Moravians and Bohemians on their way to or
from Bucharest or Auzig ; and the arrivals from the
boat filled it to overflowing, for its accommodation was
scant, and its attractions solely confined to its gaily-
painted and blossom-buried exterior. There was but
one common sitting-room, but one common supper-
table, and the guests, whether graffins or glass en-
gravers, were treated without distinction ; a Bohemian
Gasthof is about the only place upon earth where you
see the doctrine of equality in absolute and positive
practice. The Sclavonians, accustomed to it, took it
unmurmuringly ; the English tourists grumbled un-
ceasingly; preserved (the ladies in especial) a dead
f2
6S STRATHMOEE.
silence to companions for whose respectability they
had no voucher ; scorned the sausage, the baked pie,
the cucumber-soup, and the rest of the national menu,
and solaced themselves with gloomy consumption of
hard biscuits from their travelling-bags ; while with-
out, under the lindens, on the sward before the door,
Strathmore's Albanian servant making a raid upon
the Gasthof larder with the celerity of long continental
experience, spread on a little table the best fried trout,
Toplitz and other fare that the inn afforded for the
refreshment of the fair traveller with the Titian face,
who, refusing to enter the hostelry, sat on a bench
under the limes, leaning against the rough bark as
gracefully as amongst velvet cushions, looking upward
at Strathmore with her soft Orientalesque eyes, while
the leaves and flowers of the boughs swayed against
her yellow hair.
She gave a Tokay flavour to the Lager, a
Yatel delicacy to the trout, a strange but charm-
ing spice of petits soupers to this primitive sup-
per under the limes ; an unsuitable but delicious
aroma of Paris to the solitary river-side hostelry in
Bohemian pine-woods. "Who could she be?" he
wondered in vain ; for on that head, under the most
adroit cross-questioning, she never betrayed herself.
She talked gaily, lightly, charmingly, with some little
wit, and a little goes a long way when uttered by such
lips. With something, too, of soft graceful romance,
probably natural to her, perhaps only learned second-
hand from Raphael, and Indiana, and Les Nuits
A
THE BONNE-AVENTUKE. 69
cCOctobre; and Strathmore, though the light gal-
lantries of a Lauzun had little charm for him, and
the only passion that could ever have stirred him from
his coldness would have been the deep, voluptuous
delight, fierce and keen as pain, that swayed Sulla
and Cimon, could not refuse his admiration of a pic-
ture so perfect as she sat in the light of the mid-
summer stars, leaning her head on her small jewelled
hand, the lime-boughs drooping above her, and the
dark, dimly-lit room within forming a Kembrantesque
background, while the river below broke against the
rocks, and the heavy odour of the lindens and pines
filled the air.
"How cold he looks, this handsome Strathmore,
does he dare to defy me ?" she thought, as she glanced
upwards at him where he leaned against the trunk of
the linden when the supper was finished, and while
she herself still lingered under the limes as the stars
grew larger and clearer in the May skies, and the
purple haze of night deepened over the hills. He
was the only man who had not bowed down at her
feet at her first smile, and his calm courtesies piqued
her.
"Do you like music, monsieur?" she asked him,
with that suddenness which had in it nothing abrupt,
but was rather the suddenness of a fawn's or an an-
telope's swift graces. Then, without awaiting a reply,
without apology or prelude, inspired by that caprice
which rules all women more or less, and ruled this one
at every moment and in every mood, she began to sing
70 STRATHMOEE.
one of the sweet, gay, familiar canzone of Figaro,
with a voice at which the nightingales in the linden-
leaves might have broken their little throats in envy-
ing despair. Then, without pause, she passed on to
the sublime harmonies of the Stabat Mater now
wailing like the sigh of a vesper hymn from convent
walls at even-song, now bursting into passionate prayer
like the swell of a Te Deum from cathedi-al altar.
She sang on without effort, without pause, blending
the most incongruous harmonies into one strange,
bizarre, weird-like yet entrancing whole, changing the
Preghiero from Masaniello for one of Verdi's gayest
arias, mingling Kllken's Slumber Song with some
reckless Venetian barcarolle, breaking off the solemn
cadence of the Pro Peccatis with some mischievous
chansonette out of the Quartier Latin, and welding
the loftiest melodies of Plandel's Israel with the
laughing refrain of Louis Abadie's ballads.
Out on the still night air rose the matchless music of
voice, rich, clear, thrilling, a very intoxication of sound;
mingling with the ebb and flow of the waters, the
tremulous sigh of the leaves, and the rival song of the
birds in the boughs. Those sitting within in the
darkened chamber listened spell-bound ; the pea-
santry, laughing and chatting under the low roof of
the hostelry, hushed their gossip in enchanted awe;
the boatmen in the vessel moored in the shadow below
looked up and left off their toil ; and as suddenly as
it had rung out on the summer air, the exquisite
melody ceased, and died away like the notes of a beP
THE BONNE-A VENTURE. 71
off the silence of the night. She looked up at Strath-
more, the starlight shining in the dreamy, smiling
depths of her eyes, and saw that he listened eagerly,
breathlessly, wonderingly, subdued and intoxicated
even despite himself by the marvellous magic, the
delicious intricacies, the luxurious richness of this
voluptuous charm of song, with a spell which the
moment it ceased was broken.
" You. like music ? " she asked him, softly ; " ah,
yes, I see it in your face. You Englishmen, if you
be as cold as they call you, have very eloquent eyes
sometimes. Are you not thinking what an odd
caprice it is for me to sing to you a stranger at
ten o'clock at night, under lime-trees ? "
" Indeed, no ; I am far too grateful for the caprice.
Pasta herself never equalled your voice ; it is exqui-
site, marvellous ! "
She laughed softly.
" Do you think so ? And yet, I imagine, you are
very difficult to please ? When I sing some of those
airs, the Inflammatus or the Agnus Dei, they make
me think of the old days in my convent at Valla-
darra ; how I used to beat my wings and hate my
cage, and long to escape over the purple mountains.
Why is it, I wonder, that a gloomy past often looks
brighter than a brilliant present? what is there in
the charm of Distance to give such a golden chiaro-
'scuro?"
" Yalladarra ? Are you a Spaniard, madame ? " he
asked her, catching at any clue that might enlighten
72 STEATHMOKE.
him as to the whence and the whither of the bewitch-
ing creature.
" A Spaniard ? What makes you think so ? "
" Because it is usually said, belle amie, that a
Spanish blonde is the greatest marvel of beauty
that the world ever sees," said Strathmore, with a
smile.
She laughed.
" Je vous remercie ! Well, perhaps I am Spanish.
You would like to know ? Ah, bah ! what a slander
on my sex it is to say that Eve monopolised all
curiosity ! "
" Curiosity ! " repeated Strathmore. " There may,
surely, be a deeper interest that bears a better name,
madame ? When one lights on a matchless gem, or
on a rarely lovely foreign flower, it is not unnatural
that one may seek to know where it has come from,
and where we may see it again."
" You are a courtier, M. Strathmore, and turn
your phrases very prettily," said this most p7woquante
of all women, with the slightest possible shrug of her
shoulders. " But it is curiosity, for all that ; and,
by all the rights of womanhood, I claim my title to
the first indulgence of the privilege. Your name is
Strathmore, and your servant calls you ^My lord/
and if asked about your country, you would answer,
' Civis Romanus sum,' with true Britannic bombast,
I dare say. Well ! England is figuratively rather
like Rome, for it slays its Senecas, gorges its Vitel-
THE BONNE-A VENTURE. 73
liuses, and is often garrisoned by ganders ! But
one more thing remains to know. What are you ? "
Leaning her arms on the table, her chin on her
hands, and resting her eyes upon him, she asked the
point-blank question with the most charming insou-
ciance and assurance of command ; and Strathmore
could not fail to satisfy her demand, though he was
not fond of talking of himself ; his egotism was of a
much loftier sort.
" Ah ! a diplomatist ! " she said, raising her eye-
brows. " Mon ami, I know your order : but you
will not content yourself with settling internecine
squabbles, and writing Cretan labyrinths of words,
and being ^ sent home,' like an expelled schoolboy, if
your two countries quarrel for a split hair, will you ?
You will want the triumph of the monstrari digito,
and the guidance of the helm through stormy waters,
and you will pine for the old Medici and Strozzi
days, when a stealthy arm could stretch and strike far
away in a distant land, and a subtle brain could com-
pass the supreme rule, and wield it, troubled by no
scruples."
" Madame," said Strathmore, with a slight laugh,
his laugh was usually cold, "if you draw such a
sketch of me at first sight though I don't really
deny its accuracy I fear I cannot have impressed
you very favourably ? "
" Why so ? You are ambitious, by your own con-
fession that you covet age for the sake of power;
74 STEATHMOEE.
and ambitious men are all alike. If you had your
own will, you amhitieux would check at no flights ;
and if we don't have the Medici and Strozzi secret
murders in our day, I am afraid the virtue that
refrains from them is nothing very much better than
fear of the analytical chemists."
As she spoke, with a certain smile on her rose lijDS,
and in the mocking light of her gazelle eyes, some-
thing in this brilhant and witching creature struck
upon Strathmore as dangerous almost as repulsive
and made him think of those women who gleam out
from the pages of Guicciardini and Galluzzi, who
dazzled all men who looked on them with the shine of
their t7''esse cVoro, or the languor of their Southern
eyes, yet whose white hands shook the philtre into
the loving-cup, and whose title was '' Opra d'incanti
e di malie fattura." But the momentary impression
passed off as she looked up laughing.
" Bah, M. Strathmore ! Ambition is a weary work
at its ripest ; epicurean enjoyment is far better :
' gather your rosebuds while you may.' Old Herrick
is the true philosopher ! "
" Spoken by such lips, his theories are iri'esistible,"
smiled Strathmore ; " only if one has the bad taste
not to care much about the roses, how then ? There
can be nothing for it but to entreat some fair priestess
of the creed to take one's conversion in hand."
" But converts have to pass through fiery ordeals ;
if you are wise you would not brave them. You
THE BONNE-AVENTUEE. 75
despise love, mon ami ; it will be the worse for you
some day."
" I shall have ^no fear for the future ; if I escape
to-night untouched, I must, indeed, be clad in proof,"
smiled Strathmore. But the smile, like the compli-
ment, did not please her ; its flattery was contemp-
tuous and derisive of her power. With quick intui-
tion she saw that Strathmore had never been in love
in his life, and would have defied any woman to
make him so ; and she smiled as she leant her head
upon her arm, silent for once, playing with one of the
lime-blossoms, and knowing that the moonlight was
shining on a perfect picture which could not be im-
proved, which might be broken by, speech. Strath-
more was silent too ; busied in restless, vague con-
jecture as to who and what this brilliant, capricious,
dazzling, graceful creature could be, here thus alone,
at night, travelling through Bohemia. While his
eyes rested on her where she sat in the starlight,
her beauty well befitting the sultry night, that was
odorous with the fragrance of the limes and musical
with the murmurs of the waters, breaking below
against the rocks, the voice of a Zingara broke on
his reverie and hers, as a gipsy-girl one of a party
camped among the pine-woods at the back of the
Gasthof drew near the group of lindens in the
moonhght ; a wild, dark, handsome Bohemian, with
a scarlet hood over her jetty hair, and her glittering
eyes fixed longingly on the jewels that sparkled on
76 STRATHMORE.
the hands of the fair inconnue, as she said, in a com-
pound of Czeschen and Romany,
" Will you hear your fortune, fair lady ? Let the
Gitana tell you your future."
The blonde aux yeux noirs, whose head was resting
thoughtfully upon her hand, started, and looked up
in surprise as the handsome black-browed Arab, who
might have sat to Murillo or Salvator, approached her
in the moonlight from the wooded shadows of the
pine-forests behind them.
" Let me prophesy for you, fair lady ! I can look
on the palm of your hand and foretel you all things
that will come to you ; the predictions of Kedempta,
daughter of Phara, can never fail," chanted the Zin-
gara, in a wild, monotonous recitative, that sounded
hoarse and sad in the still summer night as she drew
nearer, her eyes glistening longingly on the sapphire
rings.
" Non, merci ! " laughed the bright incognita, look-
ing upward at the strange picturesque form of the
Gitana, standing out in the starlight against the dark
woods behind. " I know my past and my present
it is plenty ! I do not trouble myself a moment for
the future ! "
" But in the past and the present lie the seed to bear
fruit in the future ! "
The words spoken in Czeschen sounded ominous
and mournful, falling from the lips of the Gitana like
an augury of ill; and the other shuddered a little
as she heard, though without comprehending, them.
THE BONNE-AVENTURE. 77
" What does she say ? " she asked of Strathmore.
He translated them to her, and spoke to the gipsy-girl
in her own tongue, bidding her move away ; but the
capricious songstress, whom the fancy of the moment
swayed as completely as it sways a kitten or a child,
laid her hand on his arm as he stood beside her.
"No, no! don't send her away! She is like a
picture of Murillo. Let us hear some of her pro-
phecies first. What would she say to you, I wonder ?
I have a great curiosity to know your fate, my lord ;
the fate of a man who desires age and despises love !
It must be an odd one ! Come ! cross her hand, and
let her tell yom' honne-aventure. Obey me at once !
It is my whim and my pleasure, monsiem\ Give her
some silver, and ask her your destiny ! "
A lovely woman is never to be disobeyed without
discourtesy, and pretty caprices are commands. With
the white jewelled fingers lying on his arm, with the
perfumy hair shining in the starlight, with the fair
dazzling face upraised in the shadow of the linden-
boughs, the sternest stoic could not have refused to
chime in with her fancy, and please this charming
tyrant in her most any nonsense. Strathmore laughed,
dropped a gold coin into the Gitana's brown hand, and,
leaning against the trunk, stood awaiting his destiny
from the coral lips of the handsome Arab in the silence
of the summer night, while the distant lights of the
gipsy fires gleamed fitfully through the dark pine-
woods. The Zingara looked not at his hand, but up
at his face, as the white, clear rays of the moon fell
78 STEATHMOEE.
on it on the aquiline outline of tlie features and the
varied meanings of the physiognomy, on the proud
and generous sweetness of the mouth, contradicted by
the dark passions in the eyes and the cold straight line
of the brows. She looked at him long and fixedly in
silence, with a dreamy, vague stare in her own fathom-
less eyes, while her hands moved over the beads of a
string of Egyptian berries :
" There will be love, and of the love sin, and of the
sin crime, and of the crime a curse. And the curse
will pursue with a pitiless bitterness and an unslack-
ened speed, and when atonement is sought and made,
lo ! it may turn to ashes and to gall. The innocent
may taste thereof, and share the doom they have not
woven. Your woe will be wrought by your own hand,
and you will eat of the fruit of your own past, and
through you will come death. Redempta, the daughter
of Phara, has spoken ! "
The words fell slowly and sadly on the silence of
the night, while the river-waves beat against the rocks
with monotonous murmur, and the sough of the wind
arose in the pine-forest, sweeping with a sudden chill
through the sultry air ; and as he heard them, a mo-
mentary shudder ran through Strathmore's veins at
the destiny that the Gitana vaguely shadowed forth ;
an irrepressible coldness, like that which comes from
the touch of a corpse, passed over him where he stood.
And the incognita clung closer to him, her white hand
closing on his arm, and her laughing lips turning
pale :
THE BONNE-AVENTUEE. 79
" Mon Dieu ! wliat a terrible fate ! Send lier away.
She makes me tremble ! "
Strathmore laughed, the impression of the ominous
prophecy passing off as soon as it was made ; and he
threw another gold dollar to the Zingara :
" My handsome Arab I you might have been more
courteous, certainly. If you wish your predictions to
be popular, you must make them a little more lively.
Be off with you! Go and frighten the peasants
yonder ! "
" Kedempta can say only that which she sees," mur-
mured the Gitana, sadly and proudly, as she stooped
for the gold where it shone on the turf, and tmnied
slowly away, till her form was lost in the dense gloom
cast by the shadow in the Avoode.
"What a horrible destiny!" said his companion
again, not able so quickly to shake off the vague
terror with which the sing-song chanting recitative of
the Zingara had haunted her.
" She has terrified you ? " laughed Strathmore. " I
am sorry for that, madame; you shouldn't have
tempted prophecy in my behalf. All seers from the
religious world to the gipsy camp must make their
predictions ominous, or they would carryno weight ;
and evil is so generally predominant in this life, that
to croak is pretty sure to be on the right side."
" All, mon Dieu ! do not jest ! " cried the belle in-
connue, with a little shiver of pretty terror. " It is
no laughing matter, such a horrible future."
"But it is a laughing matter, such a horrible bo?i7ie-
80 STEATHMOEE.
aventure" said Stratlimore, smiling, and thinking how
lovely she looked as she shivered with pretty pre-
tended fear, and clasped her hands, on which he
noticed a mass of brilliant rings that might have
belonged to an empress's toilette-boxes, but which
didn't tell him much, since paste is very glittering,
and defies detection by moonlight. " She deals in
the Terrible prophets always do, or what sway would
they have over their dupes ? You should have let
her have told yours, madame ; she would have given
something better to the lines in so beautiful a hand."
" Ah, bah ! " cried the incognita, shaking off her
superstition with a sweet silvery laugh. " I know my
future ! I shall triumph by my beauty till that goes,
and then I shall triumph by my intellect, which won't
go. I shall tread my way on roses, and rule as Venus
Victrix till grey hairs come and I have to take to
enamelling ; and then I shall change my sceptre, and
begin e carte, embroglie, prudence, and politics. But
I don't count on the change ; I am not like you, and
do not court Age "
" Because you are not like me, and need not wait
for Age to bring you Power ; your power lies in a
glance of the eyes and in all the ^ purpureal light of
youth' ! " laughed Stratlimore. " I fancy our ambi-
tion centres alike in ruling men, but with a differ-
ence ! "
" You are very secure in your future, despite all
the Gitana's fortelling?" she asked him, with a
curious glance, half-malicious, half-interested.
THE BONNE-AVENTUEE. 81
" Surely ! We can make of our future what we like.
Life is clay, to be moulded just at our will ; it is a
fool, or an unskilful workman, indeed, who lets it fall
of itself into a shape he does not like, or lets it break
in his hands."
" But one flaw may crack the whole ! " said the
fair stranger, as Strathmore's valet drew near them
to announce the immediate departure of a clumsy
vehicle, the only one the Gasthof could furnish, that
had been engaged before their arrival by English tra-
vellers, and in which, at her urgent instance, Strath-
more had taken the sole remaining places for herself
and her maid. " Are they starting f I am ready !
My lord, I owe you more gratitude still ; how deeply
I grow in your debt ! But I forgot ; if I take these
two places, you must remain under that miserable
little red roof till to-morrow. I ought not to have
doiie it ; Tuais je suis egoiste moi ! "
" No matter ! I am most happy to relinquish any-
thing in your service," said Strathmore, as he took
the hand held out to him within his own. He did not
care about women, but this one was specially lovely
and specially captivating, and thrown as she was on
his courtesy, he could not refuse it her. " I shall
sleep under the pines ; it will not be the first time I
have camped out, but, I confess, I was tempted to
make you a prisoner, madame, perforce to-night, by
bidding Diaz let the car go without you. Give me
some praise for my self-abnegation ! "
His voice was very melodious, and had a softness
VOL. I. G
82 STRATHMOEE.
wlien he was quite guiltless of intending it, while his
features, with their cold, proud Velasquez type, on
which the passions that had never been roused still
threw their shadow, had always a fascination for
women, who, by the instinct of contradiction ever
dominant in their sex, always seek to chain a man
from whose hands their fetters slip. Her bright, soft,
dazzling eyes looked up to his almost tenderly in the
light of the midsummer stars :
" I will thank you when we meet again ! "
" WJien I But what gage do you give me that we
may ever do so ? You refuse me any name, any
address, any single clue ; you oblige me to part from
you in ignorance even of "
" Wlio I am ! The first question you Englishmen
ask before you give your hand in friendship, or speak
to your neighbour at a table d'hote," interrupted the
bright capricieuse, with a low, ringing laugh. " No !
I will not give you even a clue. It \vill be a Chinese
puzzle for your ingenuity. When we meet (and we
shall ; we are both in the world ; we are cards of the
same pack, and shall some time or other be shuffled
together !), I will thank you for all your courtesy and
chivalry, and pay my debt comme vous voudrez !
Till then, you must submit to mystery. I may be a
prima donna, a dame d'industrie, a princess incognita,
a dangerous Greek you may think me whatever you
like. You will remember me better if you are left in
perplexity ; your sex always covet the unattainable,
THE BONNE-A VENTURE. 83
and there is a golden charm in mystery that shall veil
me till we meet ! "
"But ! what a cruel caprice ! what an indefinite
probation ! "
" Do you good, mon ami ! Perhaps you have
never had to wait before ; I fancy so ! There ! they
are waiting, and we must part, monsieur. Adieu and
ail revoir ! "
Tantalising, obstinate, capricious, wilful, wayward,
but bewitching ; all the more bewitching for that very
quintette of faults she let her hand linger in his
where they stood in the shadow, with the moon
shining on her upraised face, and the lime-blossoms
swaying against her hair, delicately scented as the
fragrance of their flowers, as he stooped towards her
in farewell: a soft, subtle, amber-scented perfume,
such as the tresses of Lesbia might have borne as she
came from her odorous bath, or wound the roses
amongst them at the banquet a perfume that as he
cauMit it had somethinoj of the same soft intoxication
as her voice had carried with it in her song.
Another moment, and the hand that had lain in
his, soft and warm as a bird, had unloosened its clasp,
and the clumsy covered cart of the Gasthof, laden
with its passengers, had rolled slowly from the door
beneath the roofing of the lime-boughs, la blonde aiuv
yeux noirs leaning out from its heavy tarpaulin, and
looking at him with a gay farewell smile leaving
according to her vow, with the golden veil of mystery
g2
84 STEATHMOEE.
flung over her lovely, dazzling face, soft with Eastern
languor, and bright with the brilliance of youth, that
disappeared from his sight as the car, creaking slowly
over the moss, was lost in the shadows of the pine-
woods as it turned a bend in the hills, and left him
behind alone.
" Who the deuce can she be ? Something very
out of the common, talking to one at first sight about
love, and singing to the nightingales, au clair de la
lune ! I never saw a lovelier creature in my life, nor
a more nonchalante one; and yet she isn't exactly
Quartier Breda style ; she has more the look of a
court than a casino. Who the deuce can she be ? "
wondered Strathmore, as he threw himself down on
the moss under the limes, smoking and throwing
stones idly into the river that flowed below. He knew
most courts and most cities ; he lived chiefly abroad,
and thought he knew every beauty in monde or demi-
monde, sovereigns of the left hand as of the right.
The numberless anomalies in this dazzling inconnue
piqued his curiosity the first of her sex who had ever
so far excited him. Strathmore thought romance
simply insanity, and had lived at too thorough a pace
to care to twist a chance into an adventure, and make
poetic material out of a rencontre with a stranger, as
other men might have done. But he thought of
her, and of little save her, where he lay smoking,
while the river broke against its overhanging banks,
and the hea^y odours of the pines rolled down from
the hills above. And as he mused over the bright
THE BONNE-A VENTURE. 85
capricious mystery that had come and gone suddenly
as a swallow comes and goes through the air, and lis-
tened to the distant chimes of churches and monas-
teries, tolling out the shorts ummer hours as the night
wore away, to the villages sleeping below, he only
thought once, as he caught the gleam of the camp-
fires flashing fitfully in the darkness from the gloom
of the pine-woods, with the dark lurid glare of a
Rembrandt scene, while their flames leapt up through
the fan-like boughs of the firs, of the destiny the
Zingara girl had foretold him ; and then he smiled as
he remembered the prophecy the Gitana had made.
SQ
CHAPTEE YI.
THE WHITE DOMINO POWDEEED WITH GOLDEN
BEES.
"Not seen La Vavasour! mon clier you have
yet to live !" yawned Artlins cle Belkis, Vicomte and
Chambellan du Roi.
Cards and gold lay on the table in confusion in
Stratlimore's room at Menrice's ; four or five men
had been dining with him, and had been playing
baccarat for the last hour or two, as more piquant
than the olives and more tasteful than the Burgundies
they had trifled with and left.
It was about twelve months since his run down the
Moldau ; affairs threatening to the peace of the Prin-
cipalities had kept him much longer than he had ima-
gined, and this was the first night of his arrival in
Paris, free for a little time after his negotiations
with Prince Michel, though he meant to leave again
THE WHITE DOMINO. 8 7
as soon as the races were run at Cliantilly, where
his own chesnut, Marechalej stood a good second for
the French Derby.
" Yet to liveT' he said, lying back in his arm-chair
and curling a leaf round his cigarette. "My life
don't hang in women's eyes, thank Heaven ! I can
exist very comfortably without seeing your divine
Vavasour for the next twenty years, if that's all, and
by that time I suspect nobody will care much about
seeing her ; your superb Helen will be like most
other Helens of a certain age then ; decoUetee to a
disadvantage, ruddled with rouge, jealous of her
daughters, and fat (or scraggy), ^ fairs fremirr
" Blasphemer, hold your tongue !" cried Bellus.
"What a futiu^e for La Vavasour! She would
poison herself with a bonbon, or die of a bouquet
of heliotrope, before she'd exist for such a degrada-
tion !"
" Tres cher, she may be a spoiled beauty, but she
can't change the lavrs of nature. Briedenbach and
Bulli haven't the Breuvage de Ninon in their treasury,
and to be steeled against and disenchanted with the
loveliest mistress, one has only to remember ivhat she
will be r
" Or to see what she is, sometimes, even will
do," laughed the Vicomte. " Full dress, what lovely
figures they have ! but the' embonpoint is dreadfully
fictitious with certain divinities we know !"
" And so is the bloom ! However, so as they look
88 STEATHMORE.
well that's all they think about," laughed Strathmore.
"I always make up my mind, though, to enamel,
&c. ; I should die of a mistress who was hete, and
their wit's rarely worth much till they've come to
their first touch of rouge."
" The Lady Vavasour is alone an exception ; her
bloom is her own as yet ; but her mots are perfec-
tion. You must see her, Strathmore; she'll make
you recant that heterodoxy."
" I don't the least think she will," said Strathmore,
giving a spin to one of the gold pieces. " My dear
Arthus, I have seen so many of those divine beauties,
those dames du monde, those Helens ala mode. I admire
them ; they |are delightfully bred ; they are perfectly
ganttesj chausseesy coiffees, tirees a quatre epingles ; they
are charming to talk to in their own boudoirs, where the
light is half veiled, and your eyes are the same ; they
are admirable when you want a little love a discretion,
with Cupid delicately scented with bouquet, and with
pleasant platonics as elastic as india-rubber. I ad-
mire them ; but I have seen so many ; there can be
nothing so very new in the salons ! Your exquisite
Marchioness may be the best of the kind, but then
one knows the kind so well ! Who was she, by-the-
by?"
" Well ! nobody knows exactly," said Lyster Gage,
of the British Legation, reluctant to admit such a
flaw in this idol as that she had not a pedigree to
flutter in the face of the world, blazoned with bezants
THE WHITE DOMINO. 89
of gold, and rich in heraldic quarterings. "When
she appeared at St. Petersburg, you know slie was
already Marchioness of Vavasour ; it was said that
the Marquis had married her in the Mauritius when
she was fifteen those Creoles are women so early. I
never heard anything more definite, but his sixteen
quarterings are quite wide enough to cover any defi-
ciences, and her divine beauty did the rest ; she be-
came the fashion at once, and she has reigned the
queen of pleasures, caprices, and the salons exer since,
here. Her circle is as exclusive as the Princesse de
Lurine's ; it is only plain women who dare to hint her
as ' adventuress.' "
" Adventuress ! adventurer ! That is the name
the world gives any man or woman who dares to be
clever, brilliant, or successful out of the old routine !
The world must have its revenge ! Society falls
down before the Juggernaut of a Triumph, but, en
revanche, it always throws stones behind it. I detest
Creoles those black-browed, lazy, inert women, who
have fattened on sugar-canes, and learned to scold
slaves instead of to spell ! I shall not admire your
matchless Peeress."
" Peste ! " said the Chambellan du Roi, settling the
diamond stud in his wristband. " If you do7ity you'll
be the first man in Europe who's braved her. The
utmost any of them can do is to only let their eyes be
dazzled, and not lose their heads. As Tilly said of
Gustavus, ^ c'est un joueur contre qui de rien perdre
90 STEATHMOEE.
est de beaiTcoup gagner.' It is lucky Lord Vavasour
is no Georges Dandin ! "
" Bah ! So he gave her his rank, and gets rewarded
with, dishonour ! It's always the way ! That's the
common coin in which wives pay their gratitude,"
laughed Strathmore, with a dash of disgust.
"Dishonoui-? Fie, fie, Strathmore!" cried the
Earl of Lechmere, a good-natured fellow, in the
Coldstreams. " Nobody uses those coarse, ugly
dictionary words now^-a-days, except when one wants
to get up a duel. Vavasour's a wise man. They
sign a mutual Roving Commission, and don't trouble
each other to know where the cruise extends. Besides,
madame's amities ma^/ be only friendship ; some say
so, and swear she's so heartless, that her pretty, dainty
brodequins dance fireproof over red-hot ploughshares
that would sear tenderer feet to the bone."
" I don't believe in miracles, thank you ! " said
Chateau-Ren ard, of the Guides. "She must get
scorched en j)^ssant, at any rate. You'll see her to-
night, Strathmore, I expect, but if she don't un-
mask ^"
'' The sun will stay behind a cloud. Very well ! I
shall endure it. I never exist on that sort of rays
at any time. I'm getting tired, too, of Mondes
one confounds so easily with Demi-Monde, and
Aristocrates that are so near allied to Anonyma.
I should rather have liked those old times when
dishonour got a taste of cold steel. Now^ your
THE WHITE DOMINO. 91
husband is as obliging as Galba to Mecoenas ! "
yawned Stratlimore. " The lady goes to Baden ' till
the gossip's blown over,' and her lord is discreetly
silent, and doesn't trouble himself to notice what goes
on before his eyes. Unless, indeed, he thinks he can
turn the scratch on his scutcheon to pecuniary ac-
count, and make out of the crim. con. a neat little sum
to stop the hole in his exchequer, or cover his Good-
wood debts ; then he becomes as anxious as his counsel
to prove his own dishonom*, and takes the co-re-
spondent's money with a chuckling compassion for
the poor de^dl that's bought the damaged article and
doesn't know very well what to do with it ! That's
the style in England, and these Vavasours are ^of
us.' "
" Que le diahle teprenne, Strathmore ! " cried Bellus.
'' Don't be so bitter ! YoiiVQ much more fit for the
Middle Ages than you are for the present day."
" I think I am. Things were called by their right
names then ; men sharpened their steel, and struck a
straight, swift blow ; now they sharpen their pen, and
wound in the back, sheltered under a shield of
anonymity. Then they had ' honour,' and held it at
the sword's point ; now they've mock ' morality,' have
lawyers to defend it (which is something like giving
an artificial lily to a sweep to keep unsoiled), and
trade in their shame, and ask for ^costs' for every
stain, from a blackened eye to a blasted name !
Caramba ! this claret is corked ! "
92 ST ATHMOEE.
" Uncommonly inconvenient times ; your favourite
ones, tliongli, old fellow/' said Lechmere. " One
would be in perpetual liot water. Fancy an inch of
cold steel waiting for us at the bottom of every escalier
derohSy and an iron gauntlet dashed on our lips every
time we laughed away a lady's reputation. Where
should we all be ? It would be horribly troublesome."
" No doubt ! We're much wiser now. We chat
amicably in the clubs with the husband after leaving
madame's dressing-room. I don't dispute our ex-
pediency ; it's a quality in the highest cultivation in
the age; even Aspasia now-a-days takes the Com-
munion to wash away her sins in Sacramental Tent.
A prop OS of Aspasia, Vernon-Caderousse is fettered
hand and foot by Viola Ve ; she boasts that she will
ruin a Peer of France every irimestre. Take care of
yourself, Bellus ! "
" Yes, for she'll keep her boast, the little demon ! "
laughed the Vicomte. " She might begin with a more
profitable speculation than the ^ Duca senza Ducati/
as La Marillia calls him ; Caderousse is all but ' gone.'
I wish he would smash quite ; I should bid for that
Petitot snuff-box of his, the Ariadne a Naxos."
" So much for friendship ! Take a pinch out of
my snuff-box to-day, and bid for it to-morrow ; sup
with me on Monday, and speculate on my sales on
Tuesday. I think you'll have your wish, Arthus. Ve
would ruin a millionnaire, and will make very short
work of Caderousse. She should net Tchemeidoff;
Russians are the best prey ; the Rosieres revel in their
THE WHITE DOMINO. 93
roubles, and the lords of the serfs are the slaves of the
serail," said Strathmore, as his guests rose to leave and
dress for a bal masque in the Faubourg St. Germain,
at the Duchesse de Luilhier's, an inauguratrix of a
thousand modes that passed the time for her own
thorough-bred set, and served for talk for half Paris.
" What are you all going for ? It's so early yet only
twelve."
" Horrid bore ! " yawned Lechmere ; " but one's on
the treadmill, and one must tramp along with it, that's
the worst. Everybody goes to the Luilhiers."
" Stay and play, Lechmere," said Strathmore.
"You're all off, I do believe, for the sake of this
Vavasour. For shame, Bellus; et tu Brute! I did
think better of you, on my life. I never dreamt that
sort of thing survived in anybody after twenty."
" You haven't seen her," said the Vicomte, pettishly.
" Bah ! she does what she likes with one."
" A very self-evident fact, tres cher ! If you like
to be slaves of a domineering, lazy Creole, he \t\ I
don't understand your taste, that's all; but then I
suppose I'm exceptional altogether ; I don't like olives,
and I don't care about women."
" Quite right," swore the Earl, under his moustaches ;
" both of 'em make you buy the nice rose flavour with
too salt a bitterness."
" I don't know anything about the bitterness, thank
God ; I never travelled to that stage," laughed Strath-
more ; " but olives tempt one to drink, and women
tempt one to weakness, and when either the love or
94 STEATHMOEE.
the brandy's taken too strong, we lose our heads and
tell our secrets ; and, on the whole, I think two bottles
less detrimental than one woman ! Wine steals our
wits, but Dalilah does worse ; because she's a tongue
to ask questions."
" Devil take your philosophy."
"Much obliged. I don't wish any devil to take
it, male or female, Belphegor or Melusine. ^ My mind
to me a kingdom is.' I should be specially sorry for
any raids to be made on it."
" I bet you fifty to one. Strath, you adore la Vava-
sour when you see her."
/? This Vavasour tyrant. I bet you a thousand
to one I don't even admire her."
" In Naps ? done ! It's a heavy bet, mon ami,"
said Chateau-Renard, entering the wager in a little
dainty jewelled book, a gift of S. A. R. the volage,
and somewhat indiscreet Princesse de Lurine.
"And a very safe one for me," said Strathmore,
with a slight yawn. " If you don't make your wagers
more discreetly, Armand, it's not much to be won-
dered at that you come to grief at Sartory and Chan-
tilly as you do. Au revoir, if you will go. We meet
again at Philippi, I suppose, in an hour?"
" I promised the Sabreur to give him correct notes
of the Vavasour. I must notice her if she comes
here to-night," thought Strathmore, as he lay back in
a dormeuse before the fire, when he was left alone,
finishing his cigarette, while the firelight danced on
the marble bronze and ormolu of the mantelpiece, and
THE WHITE DOMINO. 95
the gas slione on the gokl lymg on the table, and on
the wines that stood in a dozen decanters on the con-
sole. " I can picture her perfectly a tawny, large,
black-browed, voluptuous woman, silent, sensual,
handsome, heavy, with a brow of Egypt, a Juno
figure, and a West Indian languor. She tahes because
of her luxurious outline and her Creole indolence,
and because she's a new style, and has done two
clever strokes of diplomacy, by persuading an Eng-
lish Peer to marry her, and a thorough-bred set to
make her Queen of the Ton. She must have been
very adroit ^these silent, still-life women often cover
matchless finesses ; nobody suspects them of the manu-
facture till the web is woven. What could the Mar-
quis be about ? However, he was three parts a fool,
they used to say, I think, and women make idiots of
wiser men if once they're allowed to have their own
way. I dare say his yacht anchored off Martinique,
and one day, when he was very hot and very languid,
intensely bored, and had drunk a good deal of brandy,
this woman had him alone in a verandah, where she
lay fanning herself amidst a pile of flowers, with the
air scented with pastelles, and everything planned to
take him in a moment of weakness, and looked so
handsome that she did what she liked with him, and
made him say what he couldn't unsay. So much is
done in that sort of way ; there would be no mar-
riages at all if men kept their heads cool always, but
they're taken at a disadvantage, just after dinner,
when they're lazy, and would consent to anything
96 STEATHMOEE.
or after the cliampagne at supper, when they talk
nonsense they'd never have committed themselves to
at noon ; or in the whirl of a waltz, when the turns of
the dance turn their heads ! If we were always what
we are between breakfast and luncheon, we should
never love at all. We're cold after our matutinal
mocha, but we're easily fooled after our dinner coffee.
What we defy in the morning light, we yield to in the
moonlight. Women know that ; this Lady Vavasour,
I dare say, lured her lord into his declaration when
the stars were shining on the mango-groves and on
the green sea-vines, or perhaps more likely she was
a nouvelle riche, and brought him money. Men barter
their good blood now-a-days ; soiling the scutcheon
don't matter if they gild over the dirt ; we don't sell
our souls to the Devil in this age, we're too Christian,
we sell them to the Dollar !"
With which satirical reflection on his times, and his
order, drifting through his mind, Strathmore's thoughts
floated onward to a piece of statecraft then numbered
among the delicate diplomacies and intricate embroglie
of Europe, whose moves absorbed him as the finesses
of a problem absorb a skilful chess-player ; and from
thence stretched onwards to his future, in which he
lived like all men of dominant ambition far more than
he lived in his present. It was a future brilliant,
secure, brightening in its lustre and strengthening in
its power with each successive year ; a future which
was not to him as to most wTapped in a chiaro'scuro
with on]y points of luminance gleaming through the
THE WHITE DOMINO. 97
mist, but in whose cold glimmering light he seemed
to see clear and distinct, as we see each object of the
far-off landscape stand out in the air of a winter's
noon, every thread that he should gather up, every
distant point to which he should pass onward ; a future
singular and characteristic, in which state-power w^as
the single ambition marked out, from which the love
of women was banished, in which pleasure and wealth
were as little regarded as in Lacedaemon, in which
age would be courted not dreaded, since with it alone
would come added dominion over the minds of men,
and in which, as it stretched out before him, failure^
and alteration were alike impossible. What, if he-
lived, could destroy a future that would be solely de-
pendent on, solely ruled by, himself? By his own
hand alone would his future be fashioned, would he
hew out any shape save the idol that pleased him ?
When we hold the chisel ourselves, are we not secure
to have no error in the work ? Is it likely that our
hand will slip, that the marble we select will be dark-
veined, and brittle, and impure, that the blows of the
mallet will shiver our handiwork, and that when w^e
plan a Milo, god of strength, we shall but mould and
sculpture out a Laocoon of torture ? Scarcely ! and
Strathmore held the chisel, and, certain of his own
skill, was as sure of what he should make of life as
Benvenuto, when he bade the molten metal pour into
the shape that he, master-craftsman, had fashioned,
and give to the sight of the world the Winged Per-
VOL. I. H
98 STEATHMORE.
seus. But Stratlimore did not remember wliat Cel-
lini did tliat one flaw might mar the whole !
The rooms were filled when he ascended the stair-
case and entered the first of that suite of superb salons
where Madame de Luilhiers gathered about her her
own particular and exclusive set, and reigned supreme.
Her ball was a replica of a hal de V opera, with a dash
of the brilliance of the Regency, a time the Duchesse
loved to resuscitate; scandal, indeed, said that she
loved it so well that she enacted the role of the Mar-
quise de Parabere with a descendant of Monseigneur
d' Orleans ; but taisons nous! scandal is ever indis-
creet, and never true, we know, save here and there,
when it hits the defenceless, or besmears the fallen, or
so delicately stabs our bosom friend that we haven't
heart to forswear it ! The low hum of many voices,
that sound which, subdued and harmless as the musical
hum of gnats, yet buzzes away the peace of entire
lives, and murmurs death-blows to a myriad of repu-
tations, filled the rooms as he moved slowly through
the throng of glittering dominoes, broidered with
gold or studded with jewels, while brilliant eyes
smiled recognition on him through their masks, and
witty badinage was whispered to him by fair in-
'cognite.
" Deucedly like life, mon cher eh f Peoj)le take
advantage of disguise to slander at their ease, and
under a mask the dastard grows daring and whispers
a scandal, or what's as bad a truth ! Very like,
life ! Under the domino how suavely they stab their]
foes, and unrecognised in the vicinity of his dear
THE WHITE DOMINO. 99
friends how secure a man is to overhear them
damning his name !" laughed Strathmore to Chatean-
Renard as he passed him in the vestibule, and went
on to chat with the Comtesse de Chantal, a bewitch-
ing little brune, who had confided to him the colour
of her adorable rose domino, and would quickly have
been recognised without any other guide than her
bright marmoset eyes.
" The domino gives one the privilege of laissez'
faire and laissez-jyarler ; it would be very pleasant if
the world were one long bal masque," said Madame
la Comtesse, letting the eyes in question rest on him
with coquette brilliance, for Strathmore was much
courted by the sex he contemned.
" Madame ! I think it is one. Who is there in it
without a disguise ? " he answered her, laughing, as
they moved on to the ball-room through the crowd of
titled maskers, while the music echoed from the dis-
tance, and the lights gleamed on the gorgeous dresses
of those bidden to the Duchesse's fete a la Regence.
" Who, indeed ! Not even Lord Cecil Strathmore,
since he disdains women, yet he flh'ts with one ! "
mmiuured a whisper at his side.
" Who spoke, Cecil ? " said the Comtesse, slightly
disgusted with the style of the attack.
" Some one of yom' court jealous of my distinction,
madame," laughed Strathmore, as he thought to him-
self, " I would swear the voice was a woman's," and
turned to see who had recognised him with his mask
on. Among the crowd of dominoes near, the one
closest to him was white, powdered with golden bees.
h2
100 STEATHMOEE.
" Fi done I it was a woman : a man would have
attacked me^ not you," said Madame de Chantal,
giving him a blow of her fan, a little jealous of the
domino that Strathmore's eyes were tracking ; more
jealous still, when dexterously disentangling himself
from her, he left her with Bellus, and followed the
white domino in its swift passage through the crowd,
that would have been a crush in any other salons
than those of the Hotel Luilhiers : followed on an
impulse vague and irresistible, as he had never
before followed the voice of a woman. With what-
ever swiftness and dexterity he traced her, she per-
petually eluded him ; though she never turned her
head, he would have sworn she knew he was pur-
suing her (women, like flies, know all that goes on
behind them), and she seemed to take a perverse de-
light in winding in and out interminable mazes, and
in letting him approach her only to escape him ; the
white folds of the domino, with its glittering golden
bees fluttering in the light, ever within tantalising
reach, and ever at provoking distance. At last,
when he was tired of the chase, and on the point of
giving it up, her own passage was obstructed ; he
pushed hastily forward and overtook her in the
Pavilion de Flore, a winter garden, where Louise de
Luilhiers had the tropics reproduced under glass in
all their Oriental heat and Oriental fragrance, and
in which the maskers were moving, amidst the broad
leaves and glowing creepers of the East, while the
falling waters of innumerable fountains cooled the
i
THE WHITE DOMINO. 101
air, and subdued lights gleamed through the dark
tropical foliage, like fire-flies in a palm grove.
" If I disdain all women, I have followed one.
Belle dame, whoever you be, I may trust your re-
proof to me shows some sign of interest in him you
condemned," whispered Strathmore in her ear.
Though she had penetrated his disguise, he could
not penetrate hers ; shrouded in her domino she de-
fied detection, and by her voice he could not recog-
nise her in the least. He only saw, as she turned
her head, that her eyes laughed, shining brightly as
stars, and that the lovely mouth below her mask had
the bloom of youth on its lips, like the soft bloom on
an untouched peach.
" Not at all ! You are far too presumptuous, and
if you disdain all women, you cannot care what one
of them thinks of you. You have only pursued me
because I eluded you ; we beat you best ' en fuyant
comme les Scythes.^ Montaigne is perfectly right."
Her voice had a sound in it familiar to him, but
not familiar enough to be recognisable in her dis-
guise. She baffled all detection, provocative as were
the luminous eyes shining on him through her mask,
and the laughing lips, like two roses d'amour, which'
were all that the envious masquerade gave to view.
" I have pursued you to learn who honours me, by
forbidding me to flirt. Presumption or not, belle
inconnue, I shall construe its interdict as it flatters me
most. You recognised me even in domino; there
must be some elective affinity between us ! "
102 STEATHMOKE.
" None whatever. I knew you by your eyes, Lord
Cecil, What does your legend say ?
Swift, silent, Strathmore's eyes
Are fathomless and darkly wise ;
No wife nor leman sees them smile,
Save at bright steel and statecraft wile;
And when they lighten, foes are ware,
The shrive is short, the shroud, is there !"
The words startled him, spoken by the lips of the
fair mask in the gay salons of the Hotel Luilhier ;
they were the burden of a rhyming chronicle, old as
Piers the Ploivman a wild, dark legend, still among
the cradle-songs of his county, and the chronicles of
his own household. It was strange to hear here, in
Paris, in the gay revelry of the fete a la Begence,
words which he thought had never travelled beyond
the woods of White Ladies, which he had never
remembered since the days of his boyhood ! Who
could she be who knew him so well ?
" Belle amie," he said, bending his head to her as
they passed under the fragrant aisles of the winter
garden, " you flatter me more and more ! I must, at
least, have some interest for you, since you know by
heart my family legends and the look of my eyes !
We cannot possibly be strangers "
" Perhaps we are enemies ! " interrupted the mask,
the sapphires gleaming here and there on her domino,
flashing their azure beams in the light. " The instinct
of enmity is quicker than that of friendship or of love,
you know, all the world through. How did you bend
Prince Michel to your mil a few months ago 1 by
THE WHITE DOMINO. 103
playing on the subtlest and surest of human passions
revenge ! "
"The deuce! is she a witch or a clairvoyante ! ''
thought Strathmore, fairly astounded. The policy he
had pursued had been closely kept, if ever the tactics
of diplomacy had been so. "\Ylio had betrayed them to
this Domino Blanc? Who was this Domino Blanc
that she knew them? Tfte only woman who could
have penetrated their intricacies was that modern De
Longueville, the Princesse de Lurine ; but the Prin-
cess was a brune, an olive-cheeked daughter of Sar-
dinia, and the delicate chin of the mask, which (save
the rose lips) was all he could see of his clairvoyante
unknown, was white as the skin of the f aii'est blonde.
" Did you think your state secrets were unknown,
Lord Cecil ? " she whispered rapidly, her bright eyes
dancing with malicious amusement. "Bah! even a
swift, silent Strathmore cannot defy a woman, you
see. If we are not good for very much in this world,
we are good for meddling and for espionage. We are
the best detectives in the world, only we can't hold our
tongues we can't keep the secrets when we have
learned them. We are so proud of our stolen nuts
that we crack them eii plein jour, instead of keeping
them to enjoy in the darkness of night, as you wise
men do ! "
"Caramba, madame!" laughed Strathmore, look-
ing down into her glittering eyes. " I think it is a
popular error that your sex cannot keep a secret ; you
guard your own most admirably for a lifetime, if you
104 STEATHMOEE.
deem it politic ; it is only the secrets of others that you
betray ! "
He had no under-meaning, no hidden innuendo in
the satire on her sex, but, for an instant, the bright
eyes of the White Domino were clouded and angrily
troubled. Perhaps he had struck, without knowing
it, on some jarring chord; perhaps she was startled
for the moment lest she^ should have encountered
clairvoyance, en revanche. Then she laughed, a gay,
fantastic chime of mellow laughter.
" Those who are wise trust us ; those who are un-
wise pique us by drawn veils and forbidden fruits. A
woman is never so exasperated as when she is refused
of course it spurs her to her mettle, and into what
is bolted and barred from her she will enter by a
chink, coute que coute. Seal a letter, and we look
into it by a corner ; shut a door, and we pass through
it by the keyhole ; tell us a thing is poison, and we
taste it, as if it were elixir. No book is so eagerly
read as one you forbid us; no secret is so quickly
found out as one you taboo to us. If you do not wish
me to learn all about the Yoltura embroglio, you will
tell me, with a good grace, what private instructions
D'Arrelio received from Turin; you were Avith him
this morning ! "
She whispered it very softly, where they stood beside
one of the fountains, falling with measured murmur
into its marble basin, and casting its silvery spray high
up amongst the scarlet blossoms and the luxuriant
foliage of the Eastern creepers. The Voltura em-
THE WHITE DOMINO. 105
broglio ! that intricate knot of Anglo-Franco-Italian
intrigue, whose slightest threads -had never been
dropped save in the privacy of the most secret
bureaux! Who the deuce could she be, and how
could she come by that? Witch, clairvoyante, poli-
tical intrigante, whatever she might be, he would
have defied her to have probed that most secret of
diplomatic secresies, and to know of a visit paid to the
envoy of Turin by a side-door and an escalier derohe !
This mystic magicienne baffled him utterly ! She knew
his own movements she knew his own thoughts she
even knew the secret moves of the great chess-players,
who had Europe for their chess-board! Strathmore
was piqued, excited, provoked ; he had never been so
impatient in his life ; he could almost have forsworn
all the courtesies of masquerade, and have torn off by
force the envious black mask which hid from his sight
the face of his mysterious clairvoyante, and which
shrouded every feature, save the sweet, sensuous,
mutine mouth, that only made concealment the more
cruel !
" The sure way to win whatever you wish, and hear
whatever you seek, ma belle, would be to promise re-
moval of your cruel mask as a recompense; none
could resist such a bribe, let their probity be what it
would ! " he whispered her, eagerly.
He by no means intended to confess to the accuracy
of her Voltura knowledge ; it might be but the clever
guesswork of a feminine politician, flung out to entrap
him hap-hazard.
106 STRATHMOEE.
" How rash you are ! " cried the Domino Blanc, in-
terrupting him mischievously. " I may be wrinkled,
haggard, and enamelled, for anything you can tell ; I
may be a Ninon of seventy, a Du Deffand coquetting
in my eightieth year, a female Mirabeau pitted with
small-pox and yellow with dyspepsia. Unmasked, I
should have lost the charm that only goes with the
Unseen. Thank you ! I am too wise to part with it ! "
" I am anything but rash, and you are anything but
wise," persisted Strathmore. " One guesses the per-
fection of the statue by the little that is unveiled ; the
beauty of the volume by the grace of the vignette that
peeps through the uncut leaves ! Enamel, madame^
could no more have given the bloom to your lips than
their bloom to those blossoms, and those eyes would
not be so dangerously eloquent unless they were
washed with the morning dew of their dawn ! "
" Charming compliments ! " laughed the mask,
striking him on the arm with the jewelled sticl^
of her fan. " But you only flatter my beauty to have
your curiosity gratified. It is not to see my face,
Lord Cecil, but to find out who whispers to you of
your tete-a-tete with Arrelio that you would like my
mask off. M. mon diplomat^ I take your flattery at
its worth ! "
"Then you do injustice to yourself and to me,"
whispered Strathmore, urgently, tantalised and pro-
voked to the last degree by a woman who knew so
much of himself and would let him know nothing of
her. " Your hand alone is insignia and type of what
THE WHITE DOMINO. 107
the tout ensemble would be were it only unmasked.
Those Titania-like fingers must have face and form to
match with them. Do you not think your mask is as
cruel as the closest veil of the Odalisque, since, like
that, it only shows us enough to make us wistfully
dream of all we are denied ? "
"Gracefully turned! were it only sincere!" an-
swered the White Domino, her low, musical, mocking
laugh echoing softly where they stood by the fountain,
where the light of the lamps was shaded by the fan-
tastic ferns and fan-like leaves of the profuse Oriental
foliage that drooped around. " But with Lord Cecil
Strathmore it is only flattery, adroit and diplomatic,
to find out who has the clue to his secret inteiwiew
with Arrelio! Neither the mask nor the veil are
cruelties to you; you care nothing for what they
shroud; and as for dreaming of what is denied to
you, you would disdain so poetical a weakness, unless
the denial involved a state secret; then, indeed, it
might haunt your sleep a little ! Listen, Lord Cecil !
I know your diplomacies, see if I know you personally.
You are ambitious, but with a singular and lofty am-
bition, in which wealth has no share. You disdain
gold as the dieu du rotiire^ and seek power alone.
You are cold, and proud of your coldness, as of the
polish of steel that has never been dimmed. You prize
friendship, but disdain love as the plaything of fools
and the dalliance of dotards. You look on life as the
clay, and on men as the plaster through whom you,
master-craftsman, will fashion the shape that pleases
108 STEATHMOEE.
you without a flaw, ductile and plastic to every turn
of your hand. You love finesse, sway, dominance;
you are independent of sympathy ; you are perfectly
and presumptuously self-reliant; you have the pro-
found subtle intellect of the old Italian statesmen;
perhaps you have their swift, dark, relentless passion
too ; but, if so, it slumbers as yet, as it slumbered
with them till it was time to strike. You are like the
Strathmores of White Ladies, line by line, feature for
feature, and vnth their physiognomy inherit their cha-
racter. Now, am I clairvoyante or not? Tell me ! "
She spoke in a low, sweet whisper, bending towards
him with her luminous eyes shining on him through
her mask, while the sapphires flashed their azure rays
in the light, and the mystical, monotonous music of
the fountain murmured on and on, and the scarlet
flowers of the Eastern creepers swung against the
glittering, snowy folds of her domino. With some-
thing of the strange, startled wonder with which
Surrey saw his love shadowed out on the Mirour of
Gramarye, Strathmore heard his character drawn in
the unerring words of the mysterious mask. A
moment before he would have sworn that no living
creature, save, perhaps, Bertie ErroU, could have
known him so well ; and the portraiture, exact to
the life in every line, startled him as we may have
Keen startled coming suddenly upon an unseen mirror
that gives us back our own reflexion in every trait and
in a strong light. He stretched out his hand to her,
his grasp involuntarily closing on the folds of the
domino.
THE WHITE DOMINO. 109
" Clairvoyante or not, you are an enchantress ! and
I must know who has studied me so miraculously
before we part. Unmask, ma belle. I cannot let
you go unknown. I will not ! "
She laughed the laugh sweet as music, that had
something menacing and mocking in its soft, subdued
carillon.
"But you musty by the rules of all masquerades.
I am like Eros, I must be adored unseen ; bring light
to unveil me, and I shall take wing ! Will you
lament as sincerely as Psyche ? Adieu ! "
With a swift, sudden movement, ere he could
detain her, the white folds slid from his hand, and
she had fluttered away, as though she literally took
wing like the Eros she spoke of, floating off under
the tropical foliage like some rich-plumaged bird, the
gold-flowered domino brushing through the dark
glossy leaves as she passed. As swiftly Strathmore
pursued ; but before it was possible to overtake her,
a group of dominoes had surrounded her, and on the
aim of one of them she had passed so rapidly out of
the Pavilion de Flore, that ere he could follow she
was lost in the throng.
Who could she be ? Who could know him so well
while she was unknown to him ? Her air, her voice,
her eyes were half familiar while yet strange, and the
mask might have effectually disguised his best-known
friend. Yet, as he recalled those who alone could
have spoken thus to him, he rejected them all; this
mysterious clairvoyante could be none of them. The
lost White Domino piqued him. Soft voices chal-
110 STRATHMOKE.
lenged him with witty mots, fair maskers kept him
talking to them that hght, brilHant badinage that
women Hve on, as humming-birds on farina, and bees
upon honey; eyes dazzling as hers wooed him ten-
derly through their masks ; but Strathmore was
haimted by one woman, to the exclusion of all the
rest; he sought her unceasingly through the Luil-
hiers' salons, but always in vain. The sweet, sensuous
mouth, the luminous eyes, the thrilling, musical voice
and laugh, which would have had magic in others,
were not what piqued him ; it was the strange know-
ledge that she had of himself, the unerring fidelity
with which she had sketched traits in his character
that he himself even had known but in indistinct
shadow till the light of her words had streamed in
upon them. Had he believed in clau'voyance he
would have sworn to it now !
He sought the White Domino persistently, cease-
lessly, through the crowds that filled the rooms for
the Duchesse's fete a la Regence sought her always
in vain. At last, giving up in provoked despair his
bootless chase of the azure sapphires and golden bees,
that only flashed on his sight in the distance to per-
petually elude his approach, he leant against the door-
way of one of the conservatories, where a breeze
reached him, cooling the air that was hot with the
blaze of the myriad lights, and heavy with the odour
of perfumes and flowers ; and stood there looking
down the long suite of salons, glittering with the
moving throng of dominoes, and holding his mask in
his hand, so that the light fell full upon the peculiar
THE WHITE DOMINO. Ill
Vancljke-like character of his head, rendered the
more striking by the dark violet of his masquerade
dress and the diamonds that studded it. He was pro-
voked, impatient, interested more than ever he had
been in his whole life save once ^and he was an-
noyed with himself that he had so mismanaged the
affair as to let the Domino Blanc slip from his hands.
He was annoyed with himself, and not less so when,
as he stood there, snowy folds swept past him, the
jewelled handle of a fan struck his arm, and a soft
voice was in his ear :
"Reveur! you look like a portrait of the Old
Masters ! Are you thinking of the Yoltura affair, or
of me ? You will be foiled with both ; Arrelio will
not sign, and I shall not unmask! Good night,
Strathmore ! Perhaps I shall haunt your sleep this
morning, as I know a state secret ! "
The words were scarce whispered before she had
passed him ! Again she eluded his detention ; again,
swift as lightning, he pursued her, this all-mysterious
and all-tantalising mask ; but destiny was against
him. The throng parted them, an Austrian Baroness
detained him, the trailing folds of a rose domino en-
tangled him ; she was perpetually at a distance as he
followed her through the salons, which she was then
leaving on the arm of a black domino to go to her
carriage, the golden bees glittering, the snowy dress
fluttering, just far enough off to be provokingly near
and provokingly distant, as, detained now by this,
now by that, he threaded his way through the inter-
minable length of the salons, ante-chambers, cabinets
112 STEATHMOKE.
de peinture, and reception-rooms in her wake, and
passed out into the staircase at the very moment that
she was descending its last step ! She had a crowd
about her, following her as courtiers follow their
Queen, and her sapphires were gleaming and her
white domino glittering as she crossed in a blaze of
light the marble parquet of the magnificent hall of
the Hotel Luilhiers.
" A white domino, powdered with gold bees ! can
you tell me whose that is, Arthus?" asked Strath-
more, eagerly, where he stretched over the balustrade
as Bellus came out of the vestibule, while below,
with her masked court about her, she passed on to
her carriage.
" A white domino with golden bees ! " cried the
Vicomte. " Pardieu ! you have seen her, then ? "
" Seen her I Seen whom % "
" Did she take off her mask ? " went on Bellus, not
heeding the counter-question. " Did you see her
face? Did you look at her well? What do you
think of her?"
" Her ! Whom f I ask you who the white domino
is. Look quick ! you will catch her before she has
passed out of the hall. Whose domino is that ? "
" That ? Nom de Dieu ! that is heks ? "
" Hers ? Curse your pronouns ! She must have
a name ! Whose ? "
" Peste ! Lady Vavasour. You have seen her,
then, at last ! "
I
113
CHAPTEE VII.
MOONLIGHT.
Marion Lady Vavasour and Vaux sat before her
dressing-room fire (which she had lighted in summer
or winter), watching the embers play, nestled in the
cozy depths of her luxurious chair, with a novel open
in her lap, and her long shining tresses unbound and
hanging in as loose, rippled luxuriance as the hair of
the Venus a la Coquille. No toilette was so becoming
as the azure neglige of softest Indian texture, with
its profusion of gossamer lace about the arms and
bosom, that she wore ; no chaussure more bewitching
than the slipper, fantastically broidered with gold
and pearls, into which the foot she held out to the
fire to warm was slipped ; no sanctuary for that belle
des belles fitter and more enticing than the dressing-
room, with its rose tendre hangings, its silver swinging ,
lamps, its toilette-table shrouded in lace, its mirrors
VOL. I, 1
114 STRATHMORE.
framed in Dresden, its jaspar tazze filled with jewels,
its gemmed vases full of flowers, its crystal carafes of
perfmnes and bouquets, its thousand things of luxury
and grace. Here, perhaps, Marion Lady Vavasour,
who had rarest loveliness at all hours, looked her
loveliest of all ; and here she sat now, thinking, while
the firelight shone on the dazzling whiteness of her
skin, on the luminous depths of her eyes, on the
shining unbound tresses of her hair, and on the
diamond-studded circlet on her fair left hand that
was the badge of her allegiance to one lord, and the
signet of her title to reign, a Queen of Society and a
Marchioness of Vavasour and Vaux. Her thoughts
might well be sunny ones ; she was in the years of
her youth and the height of her beauty ; she had not
a caprice she could not carry out, nor a wish she could
not gratify. Her world, delirious with her fascina-
tion and ductile to her magic, let her place her foot
on its neck and rule it as she would ; she was censed
with the purple incense of worship wherever she
moved, and gave out life and death with her smile
and her frown, with a soft whispered word, or a
moue boudeuse. From a station of comparative ob-
scurity, when her existence had threatened to pass
away in insular monotony and colonial obscurity, her
beauty had lifted her to a dazzling rank, and her tact
had taught her to grace it, so that none could carp at,
but all bowed before her ; so that in a thorough-bred
exclusive set she gave the law and made the fashion.
TWO NIGHT PICTURES. 115
and conquests unnumbered strewed her patli " thick
as the leaves in Vallambrosa."
On her first appearance as Lady Vavasour and
Vaux, which had been made some six years before
this at St. Petersburg, women had muimured at, and
society been shy to receive, this exquisite creature,
come none knew whence, born from no one knew
whom, with whom the world in general conceived
that my lord Marquis had made a wretche.d mes-
alliance; the Marquis being a man sans reprocJie as
far as " blood " went, if upon some other score he was
not quite so stainless as might have been. But the
world in veiy brief time gave way before her : with
the sceptre of a matchless loveliness, and the skill of
a born tactician, she cleared all obstacles, overruled
all opponents, bore down all hesitations, silenced all
sneers. She created a furore, she became the mode ;
women might slander her as they would, they could
do nothing against her ; and in brief time, from her
debut by finesse, by witchery, by the double right of
her own resistless fascination, and the dignity of her
lord's name, Marion Marchioness of Vavasour and
Vaux was a Power in the world of fashion, and an
acknowledged leader in her own spheres of ton, plea-
sure, and coquetry. " Woman's wit" can do anjrthing
if it be given free run and free scope, and with that
indescribable yet priceless quality of her sex she was
richly endowed. How richly, you will conceive
when I say that, she had so effectually silenced and
i2
116 STEATHMORE.
bewitched society, that in society (save here and
there, where two or three very malicious grandes
dames, whom she had outrivalled, were gathered to-
gether for spleen, slander, and Souchong) the ques-
tion of her Origin was never now mooted. It would,
indeed, have been as presumptuous to have debated
such a question with her, as for the Hours to have
asked Aphrodite of her birth when the amber-drop-
ping golden tresses and the snowy shoulders rose up
from the white sea-foam. Lady Vavasour was Her-
self, and was all-sufficient for herself. Her delicate
azure veins were her sangre azul, her fair white
hands were her seize quartiers, her shining tresses
were her bezants d'or, and her luminous eyes her
blazonry. Garter King-at-Arms himself, looking on
her, w^ould have forgotten heraldry, flung the bare,
lifeless skeleton of pedigree to the winds before the
living beauty, and allowed that Venus needs no Pur-
suivant's marshalling.
She sat looking into the dressing-room fire, while
the gleam of the wax-lights was warm on her brow,
and played in the depths of her dazzling eyes; a
pleased smile lingered about her lovely lips, and her
fingers idly played with the leaves of her novel her
thoughts were more amusing than its pages. She
was thinking over the triumphs of the past night and
day ; of how she had wooed from the Marquis
d'Arrelio, for pure insouciant curiosity, state secrets
that honour and prudence alike bade him withhold,
but which he was powerless to deny before her magi-
1
TWO NIGHT PIOTUEES. 117
cal witcliery; of how Constantine of Lanaris liacl
followed her from Athens, to lay at her feet the
sworn homage of a Prince, and be rewarded with a
tap of a fan painted by Watteau ; of the imperial
sables Duke Nicholas Tchemidoff had flung down
a la Raleigh on a damp spot on the Terrace des
Feuillans, where, otherwise, her dainty brodequins
would have been set on some moist fallen leaves, as
they had strolled there together; of the pieces of
Henri Deux and Rose Berri ware, dearer to him
than his life, which that king of connoisseurs. Lord
Weiverden, had presented to her, sacrificing his
Faience for the sake of a smile ; of the words which
men had whispered to her in the perfumed demie-
lumiere of her violet-hung boudoir, while her eyes
laughed and lured them softly and resistlessly to
their doom ; of all the triumphs of the past twelve
hours, since the doors of her hotel in the Place
Vendome had first been opened at two o'clock in the
day to her crowding court, to now, when she had
quitted the bal masque of her friend Louise de
Luilhier, and was inhaling again in memory the
incense on which she lived. For the belle Marquise
was a finished coquette, never sated with conquest ;
and it was said, in certain circles antagonistic to her
own, that neither her coquetries nor her conquests
were wholly harmless. But every flower, even the
fairest, has its shadow beneath it as it swings in the
sunlight !
" He did not remember me ! " thought the Venus
118 STEATHMOEE.
Aphrodite of the rose-hung 'dressing-room, looking
with a smile into the flames of the fire, which it was
her whim to have even in so warm a night as was this
one. " My voice should have told him ; it is a terribly-
bad compliment ! However, he shall pay for it ! A
woman who knows her power can always tax any
negligence to her as heavily as she likes. How in-
comprehensibly silly those women must be who be-
come their lovers' slaves, who hang on their words and
seek their tenderness, and make themselves miserable
at their infidelities. 1 cannot understand it ; if there
be a thing in the world easier to manage than another,
it is a MAN ! Weak, obstinate, vain, wayward, loving
what they cannot get, slighting what they hold in
their hand, adoring what they have only on an insecure
tenure, trampling on anything that lies at their mercy,
always capricious to a constant mistress and constant
to a capricious men are all alike ; there is nothing
easier to keep in leading-strings when once you know
their foibles ! Those swift, silent Strathmores, they
are very cold, they say, and love very rarely ; but
when they love, it must be imperiously, passionately,
madly, tout ou rien. I should like to see him roused.
Shall I rouse him ? Perhaps ! He could not resist
me if I chose to wind him round my fingers. I should
like to supplant his ambition, to break down his pride,
to shatter his coldness, to bow him down to what he
defies. Those facile conquests are no honour ; those
men who sigh at the first sight of one's eyebrow, and
lose their heads at the shadow of a smile ; I am tired
TWO NIGHT PICTUEES. 119
of them sick of tliem! Tou jours perdrix! And
the bhds so easily shot ! Shall I choose ? Yes ! No
man living could defy me not even Lord Cecil
Strathmore ! "
And as she thought this last vainglorious but fully-
warranted thought, Marion Lady Vavasour, lying
back in her f auteuil, with her head resting negligently
on her arm, that in its turn rested on the satin
cushions, with that grace which was her peculiar
charm, as the firelight shone on her loosened hair and
the rose-leaf flush of her delicate cheeks, glanced at
her own refle:^ion in a mirror standing near, on whose
sui'face the whole matchless tableau was reproduced
with its dainty and brilliant colouring, and smiled a
smile of calm security, of superb triumph. Could
she not vanquish, whom and when and where she
would ?
That night, far across the sea, under the shadow of
English woodlands that lay dark and fresh, and still
beneath the brooding summer skies, a w^oman stood
within the shelter of a cottage-porch, looking down
the forest-lane that stretched into the distance, with
the moonbeams falling across its moss-grown road be-
tween the boles of the trees, and the silent countiy
lying far beyond hushed, and dim, and shrouded in a
white mist. She was young, and she had the light of
youth love in her eyes as she gazed wistfully into
the gloom, vainly seeking to pierce through the dense
foliage of the boughs and the darkness of the night,
120 STEATHMOEE.
and listened, thirstily and breathlessly, for a step
beloved to break the undistui'bed silence. The scarlet
folds of a cloak fell off her shoulders, her head was
uncovered, and the moon bathed her in its radiance
where she stood; the branches above her, as the wind
stirred amongst them, shaking silver drops of dew
from their moistened leaves on her brow and into her
bosom. She loved, and listened for that which she
loved ; listened patiently, yet eagerly and long, while
the faint summer clouds swept over the dark azure
heavens, the stars shining through their mist, and the
distant chimes of a church clock from an old grey
tower bosomed in the woods tolled out the quarters,
one by one, as the hours of the night stole onward.
Suddenly she heard that for which she longed
heard ere other ears could have caught it a step
falling on the moss that covered the forest road, and
coming towards her ; then she sprang forward in the
darkness, the dew shaking from her hair, and the tears
of a great gladness glancing in her eyes, as she twined
her arms close about him whom she met, and clung to
him as though no earthly power should sever them.
" You are come at last ! Ah, if you knew how
bitter your absence is, if you knew how I grudge
you to the cruel world that robs me so long, so often
of you ^"
Erroll looked down fondly on her.
" Lucille ! I am not worth your worship, still less
worth the consecration of your life, when I repay it
so little, recompense it so ill."
She laid her hand upon his lips and gazed up into
TWO NIGHT PICTUEES. 121
his eyes, clinging but the more closely to him, and
laughing and weeping in her joy :
" Hush, hush ! Pay it ill ? Have I not the highest,
best, most precious payment in your love ? / care for
no other, you know that so well."
He stroked her hair caressingly, perhaps repentantly
(few men can meet the eyes of a wife who loves
them purely and faithfully, after a long absence,
without some pangs of conscience, without some con-
trast of the quality of her fidelity and their own), and
kissed the lips uplifted to his own ; the love that he
read in her eyes, and that trembled in her voice,
saddened him, he could not have told why, even whilst
he recognised it as something unpurchasable in the
world he had quitted, where its strength and its
fidelity would have been but words of an unknown
tongue, subjects of a jeer, objects of a jest.
" And you have seen none who have supplanted me
since we parted ; none of whom I need have jealousy
or fear?" she whispered to him, with a certain
tremulous, wistful anxiety he was her all, she could
not be robbed of him ! yet with a fond, sunny smile
upon her face as it was raised to his in the faint sheen
of the starlight, the smile of a love too deeply true, too
truly trustful to harbour a dread that were doubt, a
doubt that were disloyalty to the faith it received as
to the faith it gave.
He looked down into her eyes, and pressed closer
against his own the heart that he knew beat purely,
wholly for himself.
"My precious one! you need be jealous of no
122 STRATHMOKE.
living thing witli me. None have twined themselves
abont my heart, none have rooted themselves into my
life as you have done. Have no cbead! No rival
shall ever supplant you, I swear before God ! "
He spoke the oath in all sincerity, in all faith, in all
fervour, speaking it as many men have so spoken
before him, not dreaming what the day -will bring
forth, not knowing how fate will make them unwitting
perjurers, unconscious renegades to the bond of their
word, as they are lured onwards, and driven down-
wards, powerless, almost one would say blameless, in
the hands of chance.
And the woman that nestled in his arms and gazed
up into his eyes sighed a low, long sigh of gladness.
He was her world; she knew of and needed no
other.
Then he loosened her from his embrace, and led her
under the drooping branches of the trees that hung
stirless in the warm air, into the house hidden in the
profuse and tangled foliage. Their steps ceased to
fall on the moss, their shadows to slant across the
starlit path, their whispered words to stir the silence ;
the woodland country lay beyond calm and still in
the shade of the night, the fleecy clouds drifted slowly
now and then across the bright radiance of the moon,
the winds moved gently amongst the leaves ; in the
lattice casements shrouded in the trees the lio^hts died
out, and the church chimes struck faintly in the dis-
tance their hours one by one. On the hushed earth
three angels brooded Night, and Sleep, and Peace.
1^3
CHAPTER YIII.
THE KISMET THAT WAS WEITTEN ON A
MILLEFLEUKS-SCENTED NOTE.
" Meurice's, Paris.
" My DEAR Erroll, To keep faith with you, I
must tell you that I have seen Lady Vavasour!
Rather, to speak more properly, have heard her, for
she was masked, and I saw nothing except, what I
freely confess to be, as lovely a mouth and chin as
the devil ever gave his special aides-de-camp, the
daughters of Eve, for a weapon of slaughter and a
tool of perdition. I met her at Madame de Luilhier's
bal masque, and she has her full share of Eve's curi-
osity ; for though, to my certain knowledge, I have
never seen her before, nor she me, she informed me
of everything about myself, and a Httle more besides !
She repeated one of the old White Ladies chronicles
^where could she get hold of it ? and was up to
some diplomatic tricks, whose juggling we all thought
124 STEATHMOEE.
had been done strictly in petto. I suppose tlie Naza-
renes, who lie in the lap of the titled Dalilah, let her
coax their secrets out of them. The ass that Samson
in all ages ought to smite is Himself ! You will think
her divine, I dare say ; fascinating I can very well
believe that she is, by the wiles she tried upon me to-
night ; and she's gifted with the sex's true genius for
tantalising. I like nothing I have heard of her, and
I should say it is particularly lucky the Marquis is of
elastic conjugal principles ! I never remember seeing
him, do you ? I don't envy him his wife, though I
admit she is half a sorceress, and has a very pretty
mouth; but it is a mouth that would whisper too
many infidelities to please me, were I he ! What the
deuce are you doing with yourself ? Carlton tells me
you said ^you were going out of town cttait tout^
Out of town in the middle of the season ! You surely
are not turning pastoral, and getting entete of provin-
ciality ? The Beau Sabreur a Strephon ! What a
vision ! I dare say a woman's at the bottom of it ;
but Aspasia was always your game, not Phillis, except,
indeed, with that mysterious White Ladies inamorata,
whom you wouldn't be chaffed about. But it can't
be she, because that love's twelve months' old now to
my knowledge, and must have been rococo long ago.
I will pique Lady Millicent till she badgers you out
of your secret. Good night, old fellow. I shall be
heartily glad to see you again. When will it be?
Can't you run over here ? I expect I shall get the
French Derby, though Lawton's confounded love of
THE KISMET. 125
a close finish lost me the English one. The betting's
quite steady here on Marechale, always five to one. I
shall start him for the St. Leger, and send him over
to Maldon to train through August and September.
Nesselrode's a good second. They don't offer freely
at all on Tambour, and I half think he'll be scratched.
The Abbey's at your service, of course, as it always
is, to fill as you like for the First. You will oblige
me very much by keeping the old place open, and
knocking over the birds, whether I come or not.
" Yours as ever,
" Cecil Stkathmore."
Strathmore, having written those last words as the
morning sun streamed in through the persiennes of
his bedchamber, addressed his letter to Major Erroll,
19a, Albeijnarle-street, London (where that debt-
laden Sabreur had a suite of rooms, dainty and luxu-
rious enough to domicile Lady Millicent), and lying
back in his chair, stirred the chocolate Diaz had
placed at his elbow, and sat smoking, while the
smooth Albanian moved noiselessly about, laying out
the clothes that might be needed through the day,
polishing an eye-glass, rubbing up a diamond, refill-
ing a bouquet-bottle, or performing some other office
of valetdom. Carelessly and cavalierly as he had
dismissed the Domino Blanc in the letter he had just
been writing, the tantalising mystery of the night
before was not so easily to be dismissed from his
memory.
126 STRATHMOEE.
Lady Vavasour !
For once Strathmore's keen penetration and diplo-
matist acumen were baffled and at fault ; lie could
fathom neither the means nor the motive of the
dazzling Peeress's interest in, and attack upon him.
How could a woman, whom he had perpetually missed,
and never met during the seven years that she had
sparkled through society, know him, as he would
have taken his oath his eldest friend could not do,
and photograph his character with a realistic accuracy
that he himself, limning it from analysis, could barely
have attained?
The belle Marquise lying back in her fauteuil,
gazing (keamily and nonchalantly at herself in the
mirror, with her shining hair falling over her arm,
and a smile of superb consciousness on her rich curl-
ing lips, might have exercised a mesmeric power of
will the night before, so persistently had she haunted
him from the time that he saw the last flutter of the
snowy folds of her domino. Is there any electro-
biology so potent as beauty ?
A vague prejudice had associated Lady Vavasom'
in his eyes with a dangerous and disagreeable aroma ;
he had mistrusted, without knowing her, this woman
who fooled fools at her will ; she had been a mes-
alliance, and he abhorred mesalliances ; she was a
Creole, and he detested Creoles ; she was a coquette,
and he was always impatient of coquettes. If Strath-
more had ever wasted his hom'S in imagining an ideal
mistress (which he most assuredly never did), his
THE KISMET. ^ 127
ideal would have, probably, clothed itself in some
form, pure, stainless, lofty, of a soilless honour, and
a grave and glorious grace, such as Hypatia, when
the sunlight of Hellas fell on her white Ionic robes,
and her proud eyes glanced over the assembled mul-
titudes. This malicious mask, this tantalising clair-
voyante, was certainly of an order its direct anti-
podes ! But despite all that, perhaps because of it.
Lady Yavasour, seen yet unseen, unknown yet know-
ing so much, haunted him, piqued him, usm'ped his
thoughts; and when a woman does that, what use is it
for any man to send her to the deuce, to consign her to
the devil ? Heaven knows, not one whit ! Anathema
Maranatha only incenses the sorceress, and the more
she is exorcised the more she persists.
To dismiss her troublesome memory, he took up
one out of a pile of letters Diaz had placed on a
salver beside him. It was a delicate cream-coloured
Millefleurs-scented billet, fragrant with the odour of
the boudoir, breathing of a buhl writing-case, and a
gemmed penholder, and white jewelled fingers ; it
was only a note of invitation, pressingly worded, and
signed Blanche de Ruelle-Courances, asking him to
join the party gathered at her chateau of Vernon-
9eaux, now that Paris was growing empty and detes-
table, and the country and the vine-shadows were a
la mode. The Comtesse de Kuelle was a charming
leader of his own set, English by birth and tint,
Parisienne by marriage and habit ; there was no more
agreeable place in Europe to visit at than Yernon-
128 STEATHMOEE.
^eaux, and she always had about her as amusing and
as chic a chicle as the fashion of the two nations
afforded. He read the note ; not incHned to accept
the invitation, but intending to go across the Kohl, in
common with most other European Dips and decores,
to the pet Bad of ministers and martingales', con-
gresses and coups de honheuvy Chevaliers of the order
of honour and Chevaliers of the order of industry,
king-like Greeks and Greek-like kings. His weigh-
ing of the merits of Baden v. Vernon9eaux, and fifty
other places open to him, was interrupted by Diaz
approaching him from the ante-room :
" M. le Comte de Valdor demande si milord est
visible?"
Strathmore looked up, setting down his chocolate :
" To him ^oh yes ! Show M. le Comte up here,
if he have no objection."
The Albanian withdrew (Diaz was soft, sleek,
noiseless as a panther, and obeyed implicity four
inestimable qualities in a valet, a wife, or a spy!),
and, in a few minutes, ushered Yaldor in ; a very
young man, not more than four or five-and-twenty,
slight, graceful, animated, delicately made, the beau-
ideal, as he was the descendant, of those who turned
back their scented ruffles, and shook the powder from
their perfumed locks, as they went out with a mot
on their lips to the fatal charette while the tocsin
sounded.
" Yaldor, tres cher, forgive my receiving you en
ntgligcj^ laughed Strathmore. '' We don't stand on
THE KISMET. 129
ceremony with one another. I'm later than usual,
and you are earlier. It isn't twelve, is it ? "
Yaldor looked at his little jewelled watch, the size
of a fifty-centieme, and answered a trifle a tort et a
travers as he sank into a dormeuse, and played with
Galignani,
" If you come out at noon like this, Valdor, you'll
soon lose your reputation ; you'll tan your skin, dis-
enchant your lady worshippers, and sink among the
ordinary herd, who are deep in business before we've
had our coffee, and trade in their coupons before
we've thought of our valets," laughed Strathmore,
noticing his unusual absence of manner, for Yaldor
was generally the most insouciant of hlondins, and
boasted that he never reflected but on two subjects
the fit of his gloves, and the temperature of his eau-
de-Cologne bath.
Yaldor laughed too, and stroked his moustaches
with a hand as small and as delicate as that which the
White Domino could boast.
" It is horribly early ; friends are great bores in
the morning ; nobody's mot's good till the luncheon
wine has washed it ; indeed, I don't think a decent
thing's ever said before dinner. I'm sure Horace
himself was prosy before he had sat down to the
coena ; wit must have starved of famine on a date !
I owe you fifty excuses, Strathmore, for intruding so
soon, but I wanted to see you alone."
" I am most happy to see you, my dear fellow. If
you are going to be unamusing, it's the prerogative
VOL. I. K
130 STEATHMOEE.
of friendship to prose, as of marriage to bore one you
know ; every virtuous thing is dull ; a preacher and
a prig from time immemorial !" said Strathmore, play-
ing with the dainty Millefleurs-scented note. " What's
the matter, Yaldor anything? Are you ruining
yourself for Viola Ve, like Caderousse? Has Nessel-
rode gone lame? Has some hrave du roture been
copying your liveries, or has some ugly Serene
Princess fallen in love with you, and left you vacil-
lating between the horrors and the honours of the
liaison? What is it, eh?"
" Only this once for all, I'm ashamed to say I
must keep in your debt a little longer ^"
" That all !" cried Strathmore, stopping him before
he could finish the sentence. " My dear fellow !
never trouble your head about such a trifle ; I had
forgotten it, I assure you ; oblige me by doing the
same."
Yaldor shook his head, the colour in his face deep-
ening, as he tossed the Galignani w^ith the nervous
gesture of a man embarrassed and mortified :
" I can't forget so easily ; I would not if I could.
You are too generous, Strathmore; you lend to
men who have nothing. I never dreamt I should
be unable to pay you ; I made sure that by this time
but Lascases refuses to renew my bill ; I cannot
get money anywhere just yet, and "
Strathmore stopped him with a gesture, and
stretched out his hand ; he liked young Yaldor, and
THE KISMET. 131
his own wealth, as I have said, he hekl in superb dis-
dain, save in so far as it conduced to Power. He
gave freely and royally; evil there might be in his
nature, but not a touch of meanness ; at that time he
would have succoured his darkest foe from his purse ;
the virtues, as the errors of this man, were all na-
turally in extreme; petty thmgs were not alone
beneath him, but impossible to him.
" You would get into Lascases's debt to get out of
mine ? For shame ! Trust your friend rather than
that beggarly Jew, surely ! You will repay it when
you can, that I am certain of; meantime, give me
your honour you will never renew the subject unless
I do. It was a trifling affair, and you were most
welcome to it!"
As he spoke, the generous smile, which gave much
of sweetness to his face, came on it, softening what
was dark, relaxing what was cold ; and Valdor, as his
hand closed on Strathmore's, saw all that was best, all
that was most attractive, in a nature that was an
enigma in much even to itself. He spoke a few
hurried words of thanks ; he, a bel esprit of the salons
and the circles, was now at a loss for speech now
that he felt ; and Strathmore stopped him once more.
" Not a syllable more about it ! If ever the time
come that I have to ask you to do anything, I know
you will do it for me dest assez. Are you going to
Vernon^eaux this year, Valdor ? "
He spoke carelessly, laughingly, to cover whatever
k2
132 STRATHMOEE.
embarrassment the other might feel in accepting his
generosity ; he Httle foresaw what the service would
be that he would call on his debtor to render him.
" You are ? Well ! there isn't a more charming
chatelaine than Blanche anywhere. She invites me,
but I shall go to Baden after the race week," went on
Strathmore, brushing a fly off the rose Cashmere
sleeve of his dressing-gown. " I shall meet Arrelio
there, and you get a man's meaning out of him in
chit-chat as you never do in a conference. If con-
gresses were held en petit comite, with a supper worthy
Careme, they might come to something, instead of
ending, as they always do now, in cobwebs and in
moonshine. Why do the English always get cheated
and fooled in a European congress, I wonder ? Not
because they cai'^t lie, it is the national trade. Because
they lie too much and too barefacedly, I think ; and
no gohemouche is ever tricked into even suspecting
them of the truth ! A wise man never lies ; I don't
mean because he's moral, but because he's judicious :
' On pent etre plus fin qu'un autre, mais pas plus fin
que tons les autres.' Somebody always finds out a
falsehood, and, once found out, your credit's gone !
I say, Valdor, do you know my compatriote. Lady
Vavasour ? "
" Lady Vavasour ? Bon Dieu ! I think I do !
What a cold-blooded question to ask anybody in
that indifferent way ! Who doesn't know her,
rather?"
" / don't. What sort of woman is she ?"
THE KISMET. 133
" Peste, mon clier, you ask a folio. I couldn't tell
you. She is divine ! "
" Divine ? Well ! ^ a woman is a dish for the gods
if the devil dress her not/ Shakspeare says; but I
think the devil generally has the dressing, and serves
up sauce with it so very piquante that it's all but
poison ; it's a dish like mushrooms, dainty but dan-
gerous ; with the beau sexe as with the fungi, it's fifty
to ten one lights on a false one, and pays penalty for
one's appetite ! Is she a malicious woman, your di-
vinity?"
" Malicious ? No ! Malice is for pass^es women,
pinched, sallow, and hungrily jealous ; for dowagers
who nod their wigs over whist and their neighbours'
character; for vielles filles who vacillate between
sacraments and scandals ! Malice is a vinegar thing
that belongs to a ^ certain age !' it has nothing to do
with her. She's a little tantalising, if you like ^"
" Distinction without a difference ! I thought she
was! And a coquette?"
"To the last extent!"
Strathmore laughed :
" To the last ! I dare say ! when women once pass
the boundary line they generally clear the ramparts.
I suppose the Marquis gives the latitude he takes
just, at any rate. We're not often so on those points ;
we take an ell, but we don't give an inch. That's the
beauty of vesting our honour in our wives ; it's so
much easier to forbid and dragonise another than our-
selves ! What a droll thing, by the way, it is, that
134 STEATHMORE.
an Englishwoman piques herself on being THOUGHT
faithful to her husband, and a Frenchwoman on being
thought i62faithful ; their theory's different, but their
practice comes to much the same thing ! "
" They're like schismatics in the Churches, they
split in semblance and on a straw's point, but, sous les
cartes, agree to persecute and agree to dupe ! As for
Lord Yavasour, he's a detestable gourmand, invents
sauces, bores you horribly, and has but one virtue
a great conjugal one ! he never interferes with his
wife ! He's a semi-sovereign with a lot of parasites,
a mauvais sujet with a ton de garnison, and just
brains enough to be vicious without enough to be
entertaining."
" A very general case, my dear fellow ! Vice is
very common, and wit is very scarce; fifty men
make mischief to one that makes mots. We can
fill our cells with convicts, but not our clubs with
causeurs. I wonder governments don't tax good talk ;
it's quite a luxury, and they might add de luxe, since
so many go without it all their lives, in blessed igno-
rance of even what it is ! Where does your belle
Marquise go this year ? I suppose you know all her
movements ? She must be leaving now."
" Peste ! don't you know % I thought you were
asked to Vernon ^eaux ? "
" Well ! if I be, what has that "
"To do with it? She is going there too. She
leaves Paris to-day."
" There ?" The word had a dash of eagerness in
THE KISMET. 135
it, different to tlie uninterested, careless tone with
which Strathmore had asked all his other questions.
"Yes. She and Madame de Ruelle are sworn
allies ; they are constantly together. Go there and
you'll see her. Do, Strathmore; parole d'honneur
she is worth the trouble. She is exquisite, and for
you, you icicle, she can't be dangerous."
" Dangerous ! " said Strathmore, with his most
contemptuous sneer. " Thank God, no woman was
ever yet dangerous to me; a man must be a fool
indeed who is snared by the ready-made wiles of a
coquette."
" Antony was no fool."
" No, but he was a madman, and that comes to the
same thing ; besides, Antony must have liad very
extraordinary tastes altogether, to be in love with a
woman forty years old, and as brown as a berry."
"Yes," said Yaldor, pathetically, "I do wish, for
his credit, Cleopatra had been half her years, and a
shade or two faker. Actium vrould have been very
poetic then."
" Poetic ? Pitiable, if you like, as it is now. I
say, Yaldor to go to a better theme those steel-
greys of Lee Yivian's w^ent for nothing at the sale
yesterday; they were splendid animals, and the
pigeon-blue Arab mare was knocked down for five
thousand francs ! The wines will be worth bidding
for, too ; he had some of the best comet-hock in
Paris. Poor fellow ! one drinks his wines at his
table one month, and discusses them in a catalogue
136 STEATHMOEE.
the next. Ars longa, vita brevis ! one's connoisseur-
ship survives one's friendship ; Orestes must die, and
lolaiis must dine ! Damon must go to the dogs, and
Pythias must season his dishes ! Because our brother^s
in the Cemetery, that's no reason why we should
neglect our Cayenne ! "
With which remark upon friendship, which was
with him as much serious as satirical (since Strath-
more was an egotist by principle and profession,
habit and nature, and had never had any death
touch him as he had never had any life wound round
him), he began to discuss the news of the day with
his guest, and it was not till Yaldor had left that he
took up the letter from Vernon9eaux again, and drew
a sheet of paper to him to answer it now, ^by an
acceptance.
In the little Millefleurs-scented billet lay, unknown
to its writer as to him, the turning-point of his life.
God help us ! what avail are experience, prescience, pru-
dence, wisdom, in this w^orld, when at every chance step
the silliest trifle, the most common-place meeting, an
invitation to dinner, a turn dow^i the wrong street, the
dropping of a glove, the delay of a train, the intro-
duction to an unnoticed stranger, will fling down
every precaution, and build a fate for us of which
we never dream ? Of what avail for us to erect
our sand-castle when every chance blast of air may
blow it into nothing, and drift another into form that
we have no power to move? Life hinges upon
hazard, and at every turn wisdom is mocked by it,
THE KISMET. 137
and energy swept aside by it, as the battled dykes
are worn away, and the granite walls beaten down,
by the fickle ocean waves, which, never two hours
together alike, never two instants without restless
motion, are yet as changeless as they are capricious,
as omnipotent as they are fickle, as cruel as they are
countless ! Men and mariners may build their bul-
warks, but hazard and the sea will overthrow and
wear away both alike at their will their wild and
unreined will, which no foresight can foresee, no
strength can bridle.
Was it not the mere choice between the saddle and
the barouche that day when Ferdinand d' Orleans
flung down on second thoughts his riding-whip upon
the console at the Tuileries, and ordered his carriage
instead of his horse, that cost himself his life, his son
a throne, the Bourbon blood their royalty, and
France for long years her progress and her peace ?
Had he taken up the whip instead of laying it aside,
he might be living to-day with the sceptre in his
hand, and the Bee, crushed beneath his foot, power-
less to sting to the core of the Lily. Of all strange
things in human life, there is none stranger than the
dominance of Chance.
138
CHAPTER IX.
THE WARNINa OF THE SCARLET CAMELLIAS.
Where the grey pointed towers of tlie Chateau of
Vernon9eaux rose above the woods among the vine-
shadows of Lorraine, the air seemed still perfumed
with the amber, still echoing with the madrigals of
Gentil-Bernard, still rustling with the sweep of robes
a la Pompadour, still filled with the mots of ahhts
galants, and the laughter of pretty pagans of a
century ago. For Yernon9eaux was near to Luneville
the Luneville of Stanislas, of Voltaire, of la belle
Boufflers, the replica of Versailles, the pleasant exile
of forbidden wit, the Luneville of a myi^iad me-
mories !
Vernon9eaux stood as secluded in its forest as the
castle of the Sleeping Beauty so tranquil and so
shaded, that the gay sinners of Luneville might have
been chained there in enchanted slumber, like the
THE WARNING. 139
Moorish court under the marble pavements of the
Alhambra ; but if, without, there was a sylvan soli-
tude, broken but by the song of the vintagers or the
creak of the oxen-drawn waggon, within, when the
Comtesse de Ruelle went there for the summer
months with a choice selection from her ultra-exclu-
sive Paris set, there were as much luxury, wit, and
refined revelry as ever the ^larquise de Boufflers, a
hundred years before, had presided over at the little
palace of Luneville.
No sound broke the silence, save the ring of his
horse's feet, as Strathmore drove the mail phaeton
that had been sent to meet him through the park to
Yernon^eaux, on his way to the visit for which he
had abandoned Baden. There was not a thing in
sight but the rich country beyond and the dense
forest-growth about him, until, as a break in the
wood brought into view the grey facade of the build-
ing, a riding party rode into the com't-yard by oppo-
site gates to those by which he would enter, looking
like some court cavalcade of Watteau, some hunting
group of Wouverman's, and breaking suddenly in
with life, and colouring, and motion on the solitude
of the landscape, as they were thrown out in strong
relief against the ivy-hung walls of the chateau.
" I'm in time for dinner," he thought, noticing how
well one of the women rode who was teazing her
horse with sharp strokes of her whip, and making
him rear and swerve, before she sprang from the
saddle : the distance was too far for him to make out
140 STEATHMOEE.
who she was, and, as he dropped his eye-glass, he
wished for a lorgnon.
The saddle-horses were being led off by their
grooms, and the first dressing-bell had just rung
when he drove into the court-yard. At the moment
of his arrival all the world was dressing, and Strath-
more, as he went straight to his room, passing along
the Galerie des Dames, consecrated from time imme-
morial to the repose of the beau sexe, heard a hand-
some hrune coming out of one of the rooms say
to another lady's-maid, apparently her sub-lieute-
nant in office, " Va vite chercher les camellias roses,
dans les serres chaudes. Madame desire des fleurs
naturelles, c'est sa whim comme disent les Anglais.
Ah ma foi! qu'elle a des caprices, Miladi Vava-
sour ! "
This name was the first he heard at Vernon9eaux !
^s he heard it, Strathmore, the last man in the world
who was ever troubled by regrets or haunted by fore-
bodings, who ever descended to the weakness of
vacillation, or paid himself so ill a compliment as to
imagine any step he took, however great, however
trivial, could by any possibility be ?iwwisely taken,
wished for the moment, on an impulse he could not
have explained, that he had gone to Baden instead,
and left the Mask unmasked, the White Domino un-
known. It was the first time a woman had ever
influenced him, and he resented the influence. His
prejudice against Lady Vavasour came back in full
force as he heard her maid order the fresh scarlet
I
THE WAENING. 141
camellias I The flowers were harmless, surely, and
yet (perhaps it was association with La Dame aux
Camellias !) with them she reassumed a dangerous
aspect, as of a sorceress unscrupulous in her spells, a
coquette merciless in her wiles, a woman who lived
upon vanity and adored but herself, a creature like
the Japan lilac, lovely to look on, but to those who
lingered near, who touched or who played with her,
certain destruction. By what force of argument he
could not have told trifles play the deuce with us,
oddly sometimes, but by some iiTepressible instinct,
all his old dislike and mistrust of Lady Vavasour
came back with that innocent and luckless hothouse
order.
" Who are here, Diaz do you know ? " he asked
the Albanian, as he dressed after his bath and a cup
of coffee.
The inimitable modus operandi of that priceless
person had mastered the whole visiting-list of Yer-
non9eaux, though he had, on the whole, but about
three minutes to himself for the process.
"Marquis and Marchioness of Vavasour, please
your lordship," began Diaz.
" A stupid pigeon and a clever snarer ! " thought
Strathmore, as he held out his wrist to have his
sleeve-links fastened.
" Lady George Dashwood and her sister "
" Pretty precisians, naughty as Messalina, who go
to church, like Marguerite, to meditate on Faust ! " re-
flected Strathmore.
142 STEATHMOEE.
^* My Lord Viscount Blocquehedd and M. de
Croquis."
'' One a fool, who writes slangy, burlesqued travels,
that sell because huncbeds in coroneted carriages
drive up to his publisher's doors to get a copy in
public and enjoy a laugh in private ; and the other, a
magnificent fellow, who'd have been fit company for
Scipio at Liternum, but who can't send a sheet of
copy to press without a ^ caution ' and a chance of
Cayenne," thought Strathmore, perfuming his beard.
" Lady Fitzeden, my lord," pursued Diaz.
" Who gives ball-vouchers for other people's ' un-
impeachability,' but couldn't on oath give one for her
own ! " reflected his master.
" Monsignore Villaflor and M. I'Abbe de Ver-
dreuil."
"A brace of priests, who have intrigues and absolu-
tions in their hands, make penitents and shrive them,
hide the roue under the rochet, and Cupid in the
confessional. I know the race," thought Strath-
more.
"M. le Vicomte de Clermont, Lord Arthur Le-
gard. Colonel Dormer, and M. de la Eennecourt,"
pursued Diaz, in profound ignorance of his master's
mental commentary.
" Very good fellows all of them ; dress better than
they talk, shoot with truer aim than they think, bore
one rather at everything but billiards, and bestow
more on their hair than on the brains underneath it,
coimne il faut but common-place," said Strathmore to
THE WARNING. 143
himself, with the contempt of a clever man for men
who are only educated, of an ambitions man for men
who are only a la mode, of a man who but makes
society his stepping-stone for men who never see or
soar beyond it.
"Madame de Saint-Claire, H.S.H. Helene of
Mechlin, and Lord and Lady Beaudesert, are here
too, my lord," added the Albanian, closing the list.
" I think that is all all I have heard of at present, at
least."
" A bas-bleu as mathematical and material as
Madame du Chatelet, a babyish blonde with a mush-
room royalty and a nursery lisp ; a dashing brunette
who smokes cigarettes and has led the Pytchley.
Well, there will be change, at any rate. Blanche
hasn't sorted her guests as she sorts her embroidery
silks, in shades that suit; however, good contrasts
are effective sometimes. There's nobody I don't
know, except the priests and the Vavasours. That's
a bore ; new acquaintances are much pleasanter than
f an^liar ones ; the varnish is fresh, and the gilding is
bright, and the polish is smooth, and you only just
touch the surface with friends an hour old. Nothing
wears so badly, and stands the microscope so ill as
Humanity. I suppose because we are all sham to
one another, and les liommes se haisent naturellement ;
so the electro comes off, and the hatred comes out,
when we've been some time together," thought
Strathmore, as he left his room to go to the drawing-
rooms. No one was vet down when he was ushered
144 STRATHMOEE.
into the salons, and he threw himself on a clormense
with his back to a window opening on the terrace,
plajdng idly with the snowy curls of a little lion-dog,
who, recognising him, leapt on his knee, shaking its
silver bells in a joyous welcome. Strathmore did not
care about animals ; in truth, I don't think he cared
much about anything except ^himself ! Not that he
was an egotist in any petty sense of the word; he
would have shrouded no man's light, profited at no
man's cost, taken no man's right, but he was self-
sustained and self-absorbed ; keen personal ambitions
were dominant in him, pure personal interests alone
occupied him, and the instincts and weaknesses
kindlier if you like, but more general and less viril
of most men ^had no part in him. He was kind to a
dog, for instance, because it was helpless, and he
would have disdained to be otherwise ; but to care for
a dog's fidelity, to regret a dog's death as he had
known Erroll do, were utterly incomprehensible
to him.
He sat there some few moments listlessly twisting
the ear of the Maltese, while the clock on the console
near gently ticked away the time, and pointed to a
quarter to nine ; he did not hear a step approach
towards the back of his chair from the terrace behind,
he did not turn and see a figure that stood just
within the window betwixt him and the faint evening
light.
" Bon jour. Lord Cecil ! Are you meditating on
the Gitana prophecy, or on the Domino Blanc
THE WARNING. 145
whicli ? Or is the Voltura affair absorbing you, pray,
to the utter exclusion of both ? "
That hght, mecliante voice that had mocked him
from the mask struck on his ear like the gay, sudden
chime of some silvery bell, and for once in his life
Strathmore started! As he rose and swung round,
the night under the Czeschen limes came back swiftly
and vividly to his memory; ^how had that voice
failed to recal it before ?
With the scarlet coronal of flowers on her lovely
amber hair, and the light of a sunny laughter beam-
ing in her eyes ; framed between the gossamer lace
and broidered azure silk of the curtain draperies; a
form bright and brilliant and richly coloured as any
picture of Watteau's, thrown out against the purple
haze of the air, and the dark shadows of evening that
were veiling the landscape beyond ; there stood the
blonde aux yeux noirs of the Vigil of St. John, the
White Domino of the fete a la Regence Marion
Marchioness of Vavasour! Strangely enough, he
had never even by a random thought connected the
two as one. Involuntarily, unwittingly, he stood a
moment dazzled and surprised, looking at the delicate
and glittering picture that was before him, painted in
all its dainty colouring on the sombre canvas of the
night; and she laughed softly to herself, for one
brief instant she had startled him from his self-
possession. She guessed rightly, that no woman
before her had ever boasted so much.
Then Strathmore bent to her with the soft and
VOL. I. L
14G STEATHMOIIE.
stately coui'tesy for wliicli his race of steel had ever
been famed the velvet glove that they habitually
wore over their gauntlets of mail.
"I merit a worse fate than the Gitana predicted
me, for my blindness in not recognising the veiled
pictm'e by its eyes, in not knowing no two voices
could have a music so rare ! May I ask to be forgiven,
though I can never forgive myself ? "
She smiled as she gave him her hand :
" You may. You rendered me too daring and too
generous a service, Lord Cecil, for me not to forgive
you weightier offences than that. I am your debtor
for a heavy debt the debt of my life saved ! Believe
me, I am very grateful."
The words were few and simple ; a young girl out
of her convent could not have spoken more earnestly
and touchingly than the woman of the world ; where
more florid, profuse, eloquently-studied words would
have been set aside by him as the conventional utter-
ances of necessity, these charmed and won him, these
rang on his ear with the accent of truth.
" To secure so high a price as your gratitude most
men would have perilled much more than I did," he
answered her. "But I had not then the incentive
that would tempt the world to any madness at Lady
Vavasoui''s bidding. I had not seen what I rescued,
I did not know whom I served ! "
She looked up at him from under her black silken
lashes as she sank into the chair he wheeled to her,
and smiled.
THE WARNING. 147
" You compliment cliarmiagly, Lord Cecil (you
remember^ I suppose, tliat I said I liked bon-bons),
but then, how much is true? You are a diplo-
matist; it is your habit to speak suavely and mean
nothing, it is the specicdite that will get you the Garter
and give you an Earldom."
" Lady Vavasour ^by everything I have heard of
her can sm'cly never mistrust her own power to
convert the most sceptical, and do with all men what
she would?"
Her attitude, as she sank do^^al into the chair, had
all the soft Odalisque-lilve grace with which he had
first seen her lying amongst her cushions on the
bench of the Bohemian boat ; and he confessed to
liimself that this matchless and dazzling beauty, at
once poetic and voluptuous, at once gifted w^ith the
loveliness of the serail, and the tournure of the salons,
might well play Avith men, and make their madness at
its will.
"Ah!" she laughed her airy, silvery laugh!
" but I do not profess to deal with people who desire
age and despise love ; they are not in my experience,
or my category. I shall be a long wdiile before I
credit any compliment from you, mon ami. Did I
not show you how well I knew your character at the
hal masque ? Was it not sketched, now, as accurately,
as any one of La Bruyere's ? "
"It was, though it was not drawn altogether en
beau. Is was so accm-ate that it flattered me even by
its unflattering points, since it showed that I must
l2
148 STRATHMORE.
have been a subject of interest and of study to my
unerring clairvoyante."
A momentary blush tinged her cheek, making her
loveliness lovelier, and not escaping Strathmore,
though he knew how grandes dames can blush, as
they can weep at their will, when they need it to em-
bellish their beauty, too well to be much honoured by
it. She looked at him with the same glance that had
flashed through her mask.
" Not at all ! You are much too vain ! I only
wanted to puzzle you. If my shafts hit home, it was
chance, not effort. Hearsay and penetration made
my clairvoyance, as they make all. You were no
stranger to me by name. I have heard plenty of
you from others, though we had never happened to
meet till that night in Bohemia. Come ! tell me the
truth. Do you not think it a terrible escapade to
have travelled alone, at night, in that inconsequent
manner, with only my maid ? "
" I think it a ' caprice d^une belle dame,^ which
became her far better than the common-place and
the conventional, which have nothing in common
with her," smiled Strathmore. And for once he
paid a compliment that was sincerely meant ! " But
why did you so cruelly refuse me your name, and
condemn me to pursue ^ un ombre, un reve, un rien^
in seeking to see again the phantom which had
flashed on me, when, had I but known luliom I
sought, all Europe Avould have guided me to its
idol?"
THE WARNING. 149
'^ Very gracefully asked, indeed ! " said Lady Va-
vasour, with a sign of her fan, made eloquent in her
hand, as in the hand of a Gaditana of Cadiz. " But,
first of all, you never pursued the phantom at all,
mon ami. You don't do those things ! I wasn't a
state secret, and I didn't carry despatches : seguitur,
you were courteous to me while we were together
because you were well bred, and I was a woman;
but you never thought twice about me after we
parted, except just that night, when I left you behind
to smoke and sleep mider the pines, when, perhaps,
you said to yourself, 'Blonde with dark eyes un-
usual ! Travelling alone, too very odd ! ' and then
dismissed me to think of Prince Michel ! Secondly,
I refused you my name, because it was my whim to
travel incognita; and down the river I dispensed
with even my courier. I am as capricious as the
winds, you know, and, like the winds, never change
my caprices for any one's will ! "
Before he could answer her the door of the
salon was thrown open, and several people entered
his hostess among others, with that com'tly, velvet-
shod churchman, Monsignore Villaflor. Strathmore
had to rise, and his place was taken by the priest,
who was a courtier, a connoisseur, and a coureur des
ruelles. The rooms filled; dinner was announced
and served as the little chimes of the clock rang nine,
and to Strathmore's lot fell Lady George Dashwood,
whose soft platitudes had never seemed more weari-
some to him than to-night, when they discoursed of
150 STEATHMOEE.
chamber-music, old china, Maltese dogs, new fashions,
Elzevir editions, and altar-screens, in the same un-
varying and perfectly-bred monotone, which had
much the same effect as if a humble-bee had been
perpetually humming in the flowers of the epergne
before him. At some distance from him too gi^eat
for any conversation mth her sat Lady Yavasour ;
and while keeping up his recitative with Lady George,
Strathmore could not choose but look at her, could
not choose but think of her this woman who had
been first so strangely thrown in his way, against
whom he still felt an unconquerably stubborn preju-
dice, yet who exercised over him, when he was with
her, a necromancy of air, of glance, of tone, that
surprised him, incensed him, and yet beguiled him.
Had he foreseen his future, he would have flung
aside every thought of this bright, brilliant beauty,
as he had flung aside her broidered handkerchief
into the bosom of the Czeschen peasant girl in
Prague-; but could we foresee one step before
another, would the lives of any one of us be blasted,
blundered, full of bitterness, and of evil, as they
are? Is not the misery of every life due to the
band that is bound fast on our eyes, which the
wisest can do little to lift, which makes us feel our
way blindly, uncertainly, erringly, stumbling at every
step ; which is never lifted, save when our faces are
turned backwards, and we are bidden to look behind
us at the land that we have quitted, which is sown
THE WAENING. ' 151
thick with graves ; and at the gates that are closed
upon usj on which is written " Too Late " ?
Amidst the hum of conversation, the bouquet of
the wines, the fragrance of the exotics, the number-
less murmurs of " Sauterne, monsieur ? " " Chateau
Yquemf'" Supreme de Yolaille ? " " Macedoine
d' Abricots ? " " Beignets d' Annanas ? " Strathmore
throughout dinner let his thoughts be usurped by the
dazzling face, with its amber hair drawn slightly
back from the delicate temples, in masses and ripples
of yellow gold, which was but tantalisingly visible to
him through the clusters of gorgeous flowers, and
behind the form of an alabaster Anadne that inter-
vened between her and himself. Is there any sepa-
ration more exasperating than the length of a dinner-
table? I don't believe the Hellespont was half so
provoking ! Leander could cross that if Hero didn't
mind receiving him au naturelle; but what man,
pray, can move from his place at a dinner-party?
He must say with Claude Frollo, " Anaktlie I " sub-
mit, and sit where he's put !
Strathmore found the dinner an interminable bore,
and felt his prejudice giving way; his judgment in
no way swerved from his settled conviction that
Lady Vavasour was vain, spoiled, dangerous, and a
consummate coquette, bent upon conquest, and not
over-careful of her character a glance told him that ;
but the rich, glad, luxuriant music that he had heard
from her lips under the lindens by the river-side, now
152 STRATHMORE.
sweet as a bird's carol, now sad as a miserere, seemed
to ring in his ear again, and he caught himself think-
ing a poetic sentimentalism worthy of the Sabrenr
that she must have some of that music in her soul!
Against the White Domino, the malicious Mask, he
would have been prepared and steeled; the bright
Odalisque of the Moldau, the songstress of the Spring
night, took him unawares, and disarmed him.
As the women rose at length and swept out of
the great banqueting-hall, where Guises had feasted
Valois, she had to pass his chair, the lace of her dress
brushing his shoulder, the subtle fragrance of her
hair wafted to him like the odour of some hothouse
flower. As she did so, a bracelet of cameo dropped
from her arm (ideally di'opped, she was too highly
finished a coquette to need any such vulgar and
common-place ruses) ; and as Strathmore bent for it
and fastened it again on her arm, he noticed how
snow-white and polished the skin was, like the skin of
the unguent-loving and delicate Greeks, and con-
fessed to himself that the smile on those sweet,
laughing lips was the loveliest a woman ever had at
command.
"Merci! We leave you, a I' Anglais, to olives
and repose, politics and cigarettes, solitude and
slander. How you will pick our beauty to pieces
and legislate for the nations 1 Adieu ! " she whispered,
as she passed onward.
" By George ! they did not overrate her ; and
that fool is her husband ! Faugh ! it is Caliban
THE WAKNING. 153
wedded to Miranda!" thouglit Stratlimore, as he
poured some Johannisberg into his glass, looking
across at the Marquis of Yavasoui'. The epithet and
the comparison were both somewhat overstrained,
it must be admitted ; but there are very few men, I
think, who, admiring a beautiful woman, are not
disposed to think her lord and master a contemptible
fellow, and feel very much towards him as you may
have felt on a still grey day in September, lounging
along by the sunken fence of some splendid preserves
of which you have not the entree^ looking at the
cover and hearing the whirr of the bu'ds, towards the
owner, whoever he be, for whom the game's set apart.
And when M. le Mari is a muff, or the owner no
shot, your sense of injury is very naturally redoubled
in both cases, and your animus increased. Envy is
a quick match, easily lighted, and needs no spirit
added to the wick to make it strike fire and flare into
flame.
The Marquis was not a Caliban, and not a fool,
though Strathmore, from the eminence of an acute,
subtle, and brilliant intellect, chose to call him so. He
was a short, plain, grey-haired little man, with small
dark eyes, that leered and twinkled viciously ; a very
sensual mouth, a good deal of Wickedness in the upper
part of his face, and a good deal of weakness in the
lower ; a man specially to enjoy taking the world in
neatly and slyly, yet a man not diflicult to govern by
any one who knew his weak points. He had not
very many brains, and those he had had been spent
154 STEATI-IMOEE.
chiefly in tlie study of Brillat-Savarin, and the eluci-
dation in theory of new plats and sauces. He had
taken no share whatever in public life, had lived
chiefly abroad, was principally noted for his dinners,
was considered rather an insignificant person by those
who stripped him of his strawberry-leaves ; but being
a very great Personage to the world in general, had
the kow-tow performed to him to any amount, threw
his ermine over his emptiness, covered all cancans
with his coronet, and hushed all whispers with his
wealth. He was the Marquis of Yavasour had
livings for which the ecclesiastical saints scrambled
and truckled, granting him easy absolution for such
superior adowsons, and presenting him with a brevet
to heaven, as only a decent retm^n for his rich pre-
sentations ; he had a considerable amount of family
patronage, the eighth cardinal virtue, for which a
man will get loved more than for all the other seven
put together ; he had a title of the highest rank and
longest date ; therefore, though chiefly remarkable
for gourmandise and a certain monkeyish malice, this
inert, obstinate, sly, and rather demoralised gourmet
gave the law, had the pas, and was held in high
honour and distinction by all, save, indeed, by Strath-
more, who thought again, as he looked at his lordship
" Faugh ! it is Caliban wedded to Miranda ! " It was
the first time that Strathmore had ever thought a
woman thrown away upon a man in marriage ordi-
narily his opinion was precisely the reverse ! But the
Marquis icas a provocative owner of anything half so
TPIE WARNING. 155
lovely as Marion Lady Yavasonr, though it must be
confessed he was an easy one ; the liberty he took he
gave, he never crossed her caprices, and there were
invariably between them that polite hon accord^ that
cool don't-carish, very-happy-to-see-you never-inter-
fere-with-you sort of friendship which is the popular
hue of " marriage in liigh life," and is decidedly the
best and least troublesome it can wear. If you have
to look long on one colour, let it be a well-wearing,
never-dazzling nuance ; if you have to run in leash,
don't pull at the collar, it won't keep your companion
from going her pace, and will only gall your own
throat for nothing. That discreet, tranquil " friend-
ship" of the Vavasours is an admirable thing; it's
like a well-bred monotone, or a well-bred man that
smooths over all things and never makes a row.
Galba, who shuts his eyes and shakes hands with
Maecenas, is the wise fellow. Menelaus, who raves,
can't rouse his friends in our day; he'll only get a
sneering chuckle from them all, from Nestor in at
Boodle's, to Amphimachus in at Pratt's, run the risk of
a Times leader, which is our modem substitute for
the pillory, and in lieu of Troy will only obtain a
" Decree Nisi, \Ai\\ costs ! "
156
CHAPTER X.
LA BELLE V. LA BELLE.
When they entered the drawing-room, half an hour
after, the first thing that met Strathmore's eyes was
the woman who, more or less, had haunted his memory
and excited his curiosity since the May night under
the hndens, in the solitudes of Bohemia. Lady Vava-
sour was lying back in a dormeuse, glancing through
George Sand's last novel; the full light from a
chandelier above fell upon her, making the snowy
camei dazzling, and the scarlet flowers glow; she
looked like some rare and exquisite Sevres figure as
she sat there, with her cheek resting on her hand, and
the lashes drooped over her eyes, the form perfect as
a statuette of Coysvox, the colouring rich and delicate
as an enamel of Fragonard. And yet those cursed
camellias! Was it the strange grouping of those
scarlet flowers circling the dead gold of her hair that
gave to her something startling with all her seductive-
LA BELLE V. LA BELLE. 157
ness, bizarre -with all her beauty, dangerous with all
her delicacy ; something that made him involuntarily
think of Lucretia Borgia, Catherina Medici, Clytem-
nestra, Fredegonde, Olympia Mancini, Gunilda, in a
pele-mele chaos of every divine demoniac, every fatal
facinatress that the world had seen since the world
began ; something which struck him with nothing less
than aversion for the first moment that the glowing
coronal on the amber hair met his eyes again ; but
which then forced him against himself into a dizzy,
blind, breathless, admiration, such as no woman had
ever wrung from him.
" That ever such beauty as this should belong to a
creature good for nothing but to criticise sauces, smell
the bouquets of wines, and gluttonise over green
fat!" thought Strathmore, who held all gourmands
in contemptuous disdain, and this one especial gour-
mand in particular, as he drew near her, and sank
down in a low chair by her couch, regardless that
Lady George looked chagrined, and that Lady Beau-
desert had signalled him with her fan. The bright
beauties of his set rather resented his sudden and im-
mediate desertion to another standard.
" Lady Vavasour, may I not trust to hear to-night
the voice whose music drove the nightingales to de-
spair under the limes ? " said Strathmore, to the
chagrin of Monsignore Villafldr and a host of baser
rivals.
She glanced at him under her silky lashes, and that
under-glance was the most dangerous in the world.
158 STRATHMORE.
" No ! I sing to nightingales, but not to order,
like a prima donna. The birds can appreciate me, the
bores can't!" And her ladyship included, in a dis-
dainful sign of her fan, the men whom Strathmore
in his pride had classified as " comme il faut, but
common-place" a classification, by-the-by, which
would fit, I fear, most of the members of "good
society."
" But you sang to me, and you will sing to me
again ! " said Strathmore, with the calm, appropria^
tive, Brummellian nonchalance of tone that women
always like. Women love an autocratic ruler ; even
your imperious coquettes, believe me, feel the charm,
though they won't, I dare say, often OAvn to it !
" Do not be so sure of that ! I am not Mali-
bran, whom you can hear any night for five guineas,
and I did not sing to you under the limes ; you are
infinitely too vain ! I sang pour m^amuser, and to
scandalise those English women who grumbled at the
cucumber-soup, and thought me ^evidently not a
proper person ! ' The English are born-travellers.
I wonder why they think it necessary to make one
of the specialites du voyage, a compound of ice and
acid for every stranger they meet % "
"Because suspicion and reserve are to us what
their shells are to cocoa-nuts ; they make a little
kernel look big, and if there's emptiness inside, con-
ceal it," laughed Strathmore. "But you are very
cruel to charge me with vanity. If I be vain, have
I not food for it in knowing that I am such a subject
LA BELLE V. LA BELLE. 159
of interest to one whose tap from her fan is one of
the cordons dlionneur of Europe, that she honoured
me with studying my character, learning my prefer-
ences, and even making researches among my family
legends'? Lady Vavasour must not send me to
Coventry when I remember the Domino Blanc ! "
Her eyes laughed with malicious amusement.
" The Domino Blanc seems to have made a great
impression on you, Lord Cecil ! but only because she
knew of the Yoltui-a affair^ and you are curious to
know how she knew it. No woman ever makes you
vain. What you are vain of are things like yom'
conduct of the Murat entanglement, when your
chiefs a propos brain attack so obligingly left you
alone to steer through the troubled waters. Now,
confess me the truth, were you not glad when Lord
Templetown had congestion just at that juncture ? "
" I believe I was ! If a military man's friend dies
who had the step above him, his first thought is
' Promotion ! deucedly lucky for me ! ' His next,
' Poor-fellow ! what a pity ! ' always comes two
seconds after. I understand Voltaire. If your com-
panion's existence at table makes you have a dish
dressed as you don't like it, you are naturally relieved
if an apoplectic fit empties his chair, and sets you free
to say, ' Point de sauce blanche ! ' All men are
egotists ; they only persuade themselves they are
not selfish by swearing so so often, that at last they
believe what they say. No motive under the sun
will stand the microscope: human nature, like a
160 STEATHMOKE.
faded beauty, must only have a demi-lumi^re ; draw
the blinds up, and the blotches come out, the wrinkles
show, and the paint peels off. The beauty scolds the
servants men hiss the satirists who dare to let in
daylight ! "
She listened, and laughed her low, silver laugh.
This was not the conversation with which her courtiers
usually entertained her, but, if only as a novelty, she
rather liked it.
" Quite true ! It is only here and there a beauty
like myself who can brave the noontide, and a man
who, like yourself, can stand the satire, who dare to
admit it as true. I don't want rouge yet, and you
don't want ruses yet ; but I dare say we shall both
come to them, and then we shan't like the blinds up
better than any one else."
" Lady Vavasour needing rouge ! it is an impos-
sible stretch of imagination. One cannot realise the
doom of mortality thoroughly enough to picture that
cheek of child-like bloom ever condescending to the
aid of the dressing-box ! " smiled Strathmore, his eyes
dwelling on the bloom in question, that was softly
faint, yet warmly bright, as the flush on a sea-shell.
" But a diplomatist needing ruses is not so difficult !
You must condescend to the blaiic de perle of the
bureau White Lies or you will forsake your metier,
or your metier you. If I can defy enamel, you won't
be able to defy expediency, mon ami ! "
Strathmore laughed :
" Enamelling is as much in favour in the cabinets
LA BELLE V. LA BELLE. 161
as in the cabinets de toilettes, I admit, and is very
useful in both. Nations suffer for the cost in the
one, and husbands for the cost in the other! But,
for myself, I don't think I shall ever use the hlanc de
perle you predict. I am of Talleyrand's way of
thinking, that the able man disdains so clumsy a tool
as falsehood. It is the weapon of the bungler, not of
the master. Take refuge in falsehood, and you have
dealt a trump into your enemy's hand that he can
play against you whenever he likes. The most adroit
falsehood is but thin ice that may break any day.
The true art is to know how to hold truth, and ^how
to withhold it ; but never to deal with anything else."
" Then you can never humour men, and never
flatter them ! How can power be obtained without ?"
" By using them and ruling them. Men are the
wise man's tools, to be commanded, not his mutinous
crew to be bribed and pampered ! "
She looked at him as he spoke, and saw on his face
the look of pitiless power, of imperious passion, of
merciless will, that the Gitana had seen as she studied
it under the Bohemian stars that all saw who looked
at the portraits of the Norman Strathmores, when
the western sun shone on them through the stained
windows at Wliite Ladies and, while she was fasci-
nated by it, thought to herself how she would soften
it, subdue it, break it down beneath her hands, chain
it there beneath her feet. Women delight to ponder
how " the dove will peck the estridge ; " and the
keener and fiercer the hawk which is their quarry,
VOL. I. M
162 STKATHMOKE.
the more tliey glory in blinding liim "vvitli the dazzle
of their silvery wings, and in disabling him with the
music of their soft wood-notes ! Shakspeare knew
that women justified his metaphor, though falconer's
lore might not !
" You are very secure of your future," she laughed,
while the brilliant light above her head shone down
on the waves of her amber hair, and the scarlet
coronal that wound round them, in so startling and
strong a contrast of colour a contrast that no beauty
less perfect, less delicate, less exquisitely tinted, could
ever have borne. " Doesn't the Bohemian's prophecy
make you tremble ? How horrible it was ! "
Strathmo;'e laughed too, looking into the lustrous
eyes flashing on him sweetly and softly as an
Oriental's :
" Yes ! she gave me plenty of melodrame for my
money, but I don't see very well how it can come to
pass. I'm not a hero of romance, with a mysterious
parentage or a hidden murder ; I shan't make a
double marriage, discover a family secret, or take any-
body's life in hot or cold blood ! All my actions are
patent to the world ; I fear I shall never do anything
to merit Redempta's romantic prediction ! But that
reminds me, when you talked to me that night, you
talked only in French, Lady Vavasom^ ? I thought
you were a Parisienne 1 "
" Of course you did. I would not give you a clue
even to my country."
"Which was very cruel, madame! But though
LA BELLE Y. LA BELLE. 163
you gave me no clue, you gave me a promise, and I
must claim its fulfilment."
" I gave you one ? Indeed ! I have forgotten it,
then. A year ago is an eternity to be called on to re-
member. Don't you like those Maltese dogs ? I
think they are such pretty snowy things."
" But / remember it," said Strathmore (indisposed
to turn the conversation from himself to the lion-
pups), with a smile that piqued his companion because
she could not translate it. " It was, that when we
met again you would thank me for my chivalry, as
you honoured me by terming it, and would pay your
debt comme je voudrais! I am tempted to be an
inexorable creditor !"
The lovely mouth made a moue boudeuse, but she
gave him the look that she had given him under the
lime in Bohemia soft with all its coquetry, tender
with all its dazzling brilliance.
" I dare say ! Well ! what would content you 1 "
she laughed, softly stirring her fan, while its motion
floated the subtle fragrance of her hair to him when
he leant towards her.
It was a dangerous question for such lips to put to
any man ! He could scarce have but one answer rise
to his tongue within sight and touch of that tempting
loveliness an answer that could not be uttered in the
salons of Vemon^eaux, to the wife of a Peer, to Marion
Lady Vavasour ! Strathmore bent down towards her
till his voice could reach her ear alone, his eyes darken-
ing with that swift, instantaneous light which showed
M 2
164 STEATHMORE.
to any woman that the passions he disdained. did
but sleep, and might yet wake, Hke "giants refreshed
from their slumber."
" Some day, perhaps, I may dare to tell you not
here, not yet ! "
The words escaped him before he knew it. As the
perfume of her hair reached him, as he met the glance
of her eyes, as he looked on her delicate dazzling face
where the light from the chandelier shone upon it, this
woman's beauty captivated him against his will, and
made the blood course quicker through his veins, as
though he had drunk in the rich bouquet and the
subtle strength of some rare ruby wine, warm from
the purple clusters of the South. The faint rose-
blush, that was the most dangerous of all Lady
Vavasour's charms, since it was the one which flattered
most, and most surely counterfeited nature, came on
her cheek, and her eyes met his with a languid sweet-
ness. It was the first whisper of the syren's sea-song,
that was to lead by music unto wreck and death ; it
was the first beckoning of the white arms of Circe,
that were to wreathe, and twine, and cling, till they
should draw down their prey beneath the salt waves
flowing over the fathomless abyss whence there is no
return.
Then with one of her rapid, coquettish mutations,
one of those tantalising houtades that were her most
cruel and certain witcheries, she signed him away with
a blow from her fan, and laughed lightly :
" Lord Cecil, I have talked to you alone for full ten
i
LA BELLE V. LA BELLE. 165
minutes. I never give any one a longer monopoly.
Surrender your place to, Monsignore Yillaflorj and let
the world in to our conversation."
Stratlimore leant back, and nestled himself more
closely in among his cushions with calm nonchalance :
" Pardon^ madame ! Monsignore can seat himself,
and a signal of your pretty toy will summon the
world without my moving. I am very comfortable
just now ! "
She glanced at him with a sparkle of malicious
amusement.
" You are piqued, mon ami, already /" she thought,
with gratified triumph, as she arched her delicate eye-
brows with provoking indifference, and signed Yilla-
flor towards her. Dormer, Legard, and Reiniecourt
gathered about her dormeuse the instant the signal
permitted them ; and for any evidence she gave of
remembering his presence, or even his existence,
Stratlimore might have utterly faded from her me-
mory as she dispensed the mischievous mots, the mo-
queur smile, the silent dangerous glances that were
the war-weapons of the arch coquette whom Lord
Vavasour had taken to himself.
She knew that no possible mode of action could
have better impressed her on Strathmore's thoughts,
the very annoyance it awoke in him with himself, re-
tained her in his mind; the momentary tenderness
that had gleamed in her eyes, succeeded by the tanta-
lising indifference of her dismissal, he knew them well
enough, they were the tactics of a coquette, and he
166 STEATHMOEE.
hated coquettes, " women who live on the censing of
fools, and spend their time in fooling wise men ! " he
thought, contemptuously, while, without moving so as
to give up his place to Yillaflor, or any one else, he
began to play ecarte with the Vicomte de Clermont,
at a table that stood at his elbow. Strathmore was
specially fond of that little witching French game ;
he was one of the best players in Europe ; he liked its
tranquil, subtle finesses that were to be enjoyed with-
out stirring from his dormeuse ; he liked its keen ex-
citement bought for a few Naps a side, and he was
tenacious of his reputation in it. Clermont was
almost the only member of the Paris Jockey Club
who claimed to equal him, and their ecarte was
always a sharp contest of skill. Another time he
would have gone farther out of reach of the babble of
conversation round Lady Vavasour's sofa; now,
Strathmore did not choose to let her think she could
be any disturbing element at all. It was a dangerous
neighbourhood for ecarte, or any game that hung on
skill, thought, and finesse, where every word of the
silvery mocking voice was to be heard, where every
echo of the airy laughter rang on his ear, where the
fluttering motion of the fan, the gleam of her amber
tresses, the glitter of the camei on an arm as white as
they, caught his eye every moment. But Strath-
more invariably risked danger in little things as in
great ; he never avoided it, he always disdainfully
and self-reliantly lingered in it ; it was his strength or
his weakness, whichever you like.
LA BELLE V. LA BELLE. 167
He played eight games as scientifically as though
he had been in a card-room, with not another face to
distract him from that of the king's he marked ; and
Lady Vavasom', glancing at him, began to doubt her
own power. Strathmore leant back, his eyes fixed on
the cards he held, his interest centred in the game he
played, and she might have been fifty leagues away
for any sign she could discover that she disturbed
him ; the Voltura affair she might endure as a rival,
states and princes were involved in that, but to be
rivalled by ecarte, by painted pieces of pasteboard
and a few Naps a side ! never ! She felt her cha-
racter at stake her vanity loas. (There are plenty
of people in this world, my good sirs, besides coquettes,
who take the one thing for the other, and when they
cry out their reputation's attacked, are in truth only
snarling from their wounded conceit !) The eight
games had been evenly won and lost, they were four
all, and they began la belle; the Strathmores of
White Ladies had never borne patiently to lose in
anything, they were a race that dearly loved domi-
nance, and took it, coute que coute, like imperious, un-
yielding Normans as they were ; he did not choose
that Clermont should beat him ; this evening, in espe-
cial, defeat would have annoyed him unspeakably.
The luck of the cards had always been with the
Vicomte, but Strathmore' s play had more than ba-
lanced that ; it was evident to all those who gathered
near the ecarte table that the game was in his hands.
His hostess from a distance watched him over the top
168 ' STRATHMOEE.
of her fan, while discoursing of turquoise celadon
with H.S.H. of Mechlin ; her name had some years
before been entangled with his own in that gossip
which is rife in those hotbeds of scandal, club-rooms
and salons ; the gossip had long given place to newer
slander, yet the woman of the world could not wholly
lose the tenderness that still clung about her heart for
one whom she knew had never loved her could not
wholly keep down a sigh that rose to the lips, against
which the gold-powdered down of her fan was pressed.
The Marquis, lying half asleep, pondering on a new
flavour for a salmi of woodcocks that he should have
tried by his chef the first day of the season, looked
through his shut lids at him wath snarling envy. The
Marquis always thought '^ plus beau que moi cest un
tort quHl me fait l^"* and the Norman physique of
Strathmore specially attracted his attention. " That
man's like a Velasquez picture, but he'll do something
very bad some day," muttered Lord Vavasour, com-
forting: himself with the detrimental rider with which
we alw^ays qualify an admiration extorted from our
envy. Most people in the room w^atched him as la belle
began, catching the contagion of a skilfully-contested
game, and the excitement of a chance so evenly poised
that a single card would turn the scale.
Strathmore himself was entirely absorbed in it,
entirely intent on it, keenly, eagerly, resolutely bent
on winning. He would have lost fifty times the
amount staked on it rather than have lost that
game at ecarte ! He played indifferent cards with
LA BELLE V. LA BELLE. 169
such superb skill, such matchless finesse, that la
belle was all but won, when, from where she
sat near, on her dormeuse. Lady Vavasour leant
towards him to look over his hand, to watch his
triumph, the fragrance of her hair crossing him like
the perfume of some exotic, her lovely lips, whose
charm even he had admitted, so near his own that
their breath fanned his cheek. He looked up and
met her eyes ; the dazzling beauty of this woman ran
through his veins like subtle fire, and threw him off
his guard, as though the air had been suddenly filled
with the dreamy intoxicating odour of narcotic fumes,
that bewilder the reason and charm while they weaken
the senses. He played inadvertently the wrong
card. The false step was not to be retrieved (what
false step is ?) ; it gave the game into Clermont's
hands, and for the first time for years Strathmore lost
at ecarte.
^? For the instant, trifle though it was, he hated the
woman who had unnerved him and fooled him, as
passionately, as bitterly, as though the wrong card
had been some stain on his honour, the lost game
some indelible shame on his name ! The bad play he
had been betrayed into incensed him enough, but
that she should have had this power over him incensed
him far more.
" I compliment you on your skill, Clermont. You
played admirably. You have beaten one I They
won't believe it at the Jockey Club !" he said, laugh-
ing, as he leant back again among his cushions. His
170 STEATHMOEE.
annoyance only sliowed itself in liis eyes, that dark-
ened with the swift anger of his pitiless race, though
the rest of his face never chano;ed.
" When I came to look on at your victory, it was
very uncomplimentary to entertain me with a defeat.
I thought you were the best ecarte player in Europe,"
said Lady Vavasour, maliciously, with a slight shrug
of her snowy shoulders, and as much tranquil uncon-
cern as though she were innocent and ignorant of
having done all the mischief.
" Lady Vavasour, from Paradise downwards femi-
nine interference was never productive but of a losing
game for man!" said Strathmore, in the tranquil
trainante tones in which he always spoke his rudest
things.
She laughed softly ; it amused her ; he had lost
his game and she had won hers.
'' L\me helle te perdait Tautre^ tres clier^^ said Ren-
necourt to Strathmore, as they went to the smoking-
room that night, when the women had deserted the
drawing-rooms and gone to their chambers and their
novels and their charming negligees in the Galerie
des Dames.
Strathmore suppressed an impatient oath to himself ;
the libel, like most libels, was unpalatable because it
was true. He hated the woman whose mere touch
had so fooled him, and whose SAvay and whose spells,
as he had seen her that night, he had been forced to
confess the wildest rumours had not overdrawn. But
for all that, though he owed her his defeat at ecarte.
LA BELLE V. LA BELLE. 171
and loatliecl her sudden and subtle power over liim,
as He lay on the couch of the smoking-room that
night, while Baden favourites, new caprices of reign-
ing lionnes, the hushed-up affair of the marked cards
at Flora Dohla's, in which well-known names were
involved, the dernier dehauclie of a Russian Prince,
who was startling even Paris, were chatted over with
the freedom that's only attained when the papooshes
are on and the ladies are off, and is enjoyed like
the ease of the dressing-gown after the restraint of
the grande tenue, Strathmore felt a keener detesta-
tion still for his lordship of Vavasour and Vaux, as
he glanced at the Marquis (who, wrapped in his
luxurious Cashmere robes, looked something like an
over-fed monkey, grizzled with age and pampered
with eating, as his eyes leered and twinkled at a
grivois tale), and thought as he glanced, ^'' Faugh!
that Caliban to !"
It was an envy and an impatience that many before
him had smarted under, looking at her lord and mas-
ter, so made and termed by marital right, and thinking
of Marion Lady Vavasour.
172
CHAPTER XI.
THE DAUGHTER OF EVE IN THE GARDEN OF ROSES.
Strathmore very rarely got up early ; usually
lie had his chocolate brought to him, glanced through
new novels, read his letters, had his first cigar before
he rose, and then lounged down among the latest to
breakfast. He was accustomed to say, that your best
causeur is dull over his coffee ; with his cutlets, a man
thinks of consols and coupons, and with his anchovy
only finds relish for telegrams ; in the oil of his sar-
dines his satire is swamped, and as he breaks his
plover's eggs he's only good for reading and speaking
political platitudes ; his head's admirably clear, but
his wit isn't ripe. Therefore Strathmore's rule always
was, '^ Do your own business before noon ; but don't \
be bored by your friends till after. In the morning
we're all cautious, not convivial : so breakfast and
write to your lawyer in solitude ; congregate at lun-
cheon, and take croustades and conversation together !"
THE GAKDEN OF EOSES. 173
It was a very good rule, I think ; letters written in
the morning never compromise jou ; mots made in
the morning never amuse you : and it was one he
seldom broke.
But the morning after his arrival at Vernonceaux,
when Diaz entered his chamber to fill his bath, the
breeze as it blew in from the windows, which had
been partially left open through the hot night, came
so pleasantly laden with the fragrance of the rose-
gardens, the pine-woods, and the vine-covered hills,
that it seemed for once more tempting than his yel-
low-papered roman and his chocolat a la Vanille,
which had both a strong flavour of Paris ; a flavour
than which ordinarily on ne pent mieux ; but Paris,
like partridges, may want change sometimes, and
pall as what doesn't, from women to wine ? under
the ruinous test of " Toujoursf^ For once Strath-
more felt tempted to get up early; and he rose,
dressed, and sauntered out by an escalier that led,
without passing through any part of the building,
from his wing of the chateau down into the gardens
below.
"A device of some dainty chatelaine, some dame
des beaux cousins, for her lover to pass up to her
chamber without waking the seneschal, or risking his
limbs by climbing," thought Strathmore, as he stood
on the grey stone steps looking over at the gardens that
lay before him. " Well ! we have escaliers derobes still !
Licence may have gone out of the language, but it
hasn't gone out of the manners ; we've learnt to be
174 STEATHMOKE.
hypocrites, but we haven't altered our tastes. To ad-
vance m CiviHsation is, after all, only to perfect Cant.
The nude figure remains the same delight to the pre-
cisian as the profligate ; but he drapes her discreetly
in public, while he gloats over her wwdraped in petto.
Men don't change their natures, only their faces !"
With which, Strathmore sauntered down the steps,
and took any way that hazard led him, which was
through the bronze trellis-work gates that opened into
his hostess's rose-gardens, mazes of blossom, where
the birds sang under the roses, and the air was full of
the rich fragrance of clusters of crimson bloom, as
he strolled slowly along, profaning these sacred pre-
cincts, that were as consecrated to ladies as the gar-
dens of Odalisques, with the scent and the smoke of
his Manilla. There is something in the freshness,
the stillness, the sunny calm of early morning, that has
its charm, even when we are least inclined to give way
to these things, and most inclined to sneer at them.
Strathmore essentially a man " of the world, worldly"
who lived in courts, clubs, and salons, who had
never got up and come on deck to see the sun rise
any day that his yacht was at anchor in the Bos-
phorus ; whose manual was Rochefoucauld, and bre.
viary Bruyere ; whose life had been spent in an at-
mosphere scented with perfumes and pastilles, where
daylight was never needed and never remembered,
and a purer air would have lacked in excitement ;
even Strathmore, though nature was not much more
to him than to Talleyrand or Grammont, felt the
THE GAEDEN OF EOSES. 175
freshness, the tranquillity, the peacefulness of the hour.
It was perfectly still and solitary round him, there
was not a sound but of the wood-pigeons cooing from
afar off, and the wind gently stealing through the fra-
grant aisles of the rose arcades, while the sun fell on the
eastern side of the silent chateau, and on the terrace,
with its grey balustrade covered by gorgeous creepers,
that looked like the background of some Louis Quinze
picture. He knew no one would have risen except
the household at that early hour, and as he walked
on, just under the terrace, that was at some consider-
able elevation above him, a voice startled him as it
fell on the air :
" Since when have you become pastoral ? I should
not have fancied you had had sylvan tastes, mon ami !"
She stood immediately above him, leaning over the
stone balustrade ; behind her was the ivy-hung facade
of the chateau, with its peaked tourelles and its long
range of Gothic windows ; beneath her sloped the ivy
wall of the terrace, covered with the broad leaves of
creepers and the profuse blossoms of the twining roses ;
the whole scene was like a landscape of Greuze or
Lancret, and she who completed it added to its colour-
ing of the Beau Siecle where she leaned on the parapet,
looking down with a smile on lips that rivalled the
half-opened roses. As he glanced upward, her love-
liness swept over him like the intoxication of some
dreamy perfume, now in the cooler judgment of morn-
ing, as at midnight, a few hours before, when the
light of the chandeliers glanced on the scarlet ca-
176 STEATHMOEE.
mellias. Away from lier lie could criticise, condemn,
displace, defy lier ; in lier presence, with her eyes
smiling down into his, with her voice vibrating on the
air, he might resent, but he could not resist her. She
enthralled him by the senses, so subtilely, so seduc-
tively, that she drew him within the charmed circle of
her power, even while he hated her for her dominance
over him.
" Sylvan tastes or not, would not any one, from an
idler to an anchorite, be irresistibly drawn where the
early morning proffers such a reward to all those w^ho
rise early ? " said Strathmore, as he ascended the ter- -
race steps to her side.
He had not seen her, until her greeting made him
look upwards. But what man can tell the precise
truth to a beautiful woman ? She smiled as she gave
him her hand, white, small, soft, with the jewels of
an Empress upon it ; a hand to close gently but surely
on the life of a man, and make it its own ; a hand to
be raved of by poets, and hold sages in thraldom ; to
be modelled by sculptors, and coveted by courtiers.
"Last night you were quoting from Genesis to
show the mischief done by a woman ! How can you
be so inconsistent as to seek one in Eve's special pro-
vince of mischief a garden ? A diplomatist tasting
the dew of the dawn, and sunning himself among
roses ! you are an anomaly, mon ami. Is it your
lost ecarte which has dwelt on your mind, that you
are wandering at such an unearthly hour ? "
" It is more likely to be remembrance of the one
THE GARDEN OF ROSES. 177
wlio lost me the ecarte !" said Strathmore, bending
towards her.
His voice had an unusual softness, his eyes darkened
and dwelt on her, fascinated by the voluptuous charm
of her beauty, and the confession broke from him
unawares. She arched her delicate eyebrows, and
looked at him with mischievous amusement, where
she leaned against the rose-wreathed parapet.
" Of M. de Clermont ! You must be very deep
in his debt for him to haunt you ! or perhaps you
were meditating some sure, silent revenge on him?
that would be more a la Strathmore !"
" I thank you for the hint and the reminder, belle
amie ; I ivill revenge myself for the game that I lost
on the tactician who threw me off my guard ! But
the revenge, like the payment I spoke of last night,
must wait ; it would be too great rashness to risk
taking either as yet "
He spoke softly, and with meaning ; her power was
winding itself about him, his senses were yielding
themselves to the languid charm, the subtle spell of
lier beauty ; Strathmore, who denied that any woman
could be dangerous to him, might have known, then,
how dangerous one might be ! She blushed slightly,
softly, and played with one of the rings of her left
hand the diamond-studded circlet that was the badge
of her marriage was it by hazard, or as a warning ?
Be it which it might, it served to recal to him that
the woman he looked on was Marion Lady Yavasour,
the arch coquette of Europe.
VOL. I. N
178 STEATHMOKE.
"I was unaware your tastes were a la Phyllis,
Lady Vavasour," he went on, with the smile, slight,
cold, half a sneer, which piqued her more than any-
thing, since it perplexed her as to its meaning, and
only gave her a vague idea that her game was fore-
seen, and defied. " What charm can the early morn-
ing have for you? Your preferences, surely, are
no more sylvan than mine, and there is nothing to be
captivated but the bees and the birds ! I have read
in some old Trouvere song of a hreuvage for perpetual
youth and beauty, to be gathered from the first dew
of roses can that be your mission ? If so, we must
pity, as under De I'Enclos, generations unborn, who
will suffer like us !" '
" Don't use the first person ! you never suffer,"
she answered him, toying with the hanging sprays of
the roses. " The charnt that guided me was what
rules me always the caprice of the hour: I admit
no other law ! In Paris one never thinks the day is
aired till two ; but in the country cest toute autre cliose
I heard the birds singing, the scent of the roses
came through my windows, and Ah, Lord Cecil,
though we live in the world till we forget it, there are
things better than pleasure, there is an air purer than
the air of the salons ! I am young, I am flattered, I
reign, I love my sovereignty who does not that has a
sceptre to grasp ? and still, sometimes I wish that I
were a peasant-child, playing with the brown chesnuts
under the trees, and catching the butterflies in the
sunshine ! "
THE GAEDEN OF ROSES. 179
I have said that she had now and then a tendressey
a mournf ulness, real or assumed ; and at such mo-
ments, while the lids drooped softly over the black
gazelle eyes, and a shadow of sadness stole the bril-
liance from her face, she was yet more resistless than
in her most dazzling coquetry. Even Strathmore felt
its charm, though, now, with the gestm-e that had
recalled to him her title and her ownership, he had
steeled himself afresh against her.
"Indeed!" he answered her, with the smile she
mistrusted. " The world would scarcely credit you.
Lady Vavasour ; to play with men's lives must be
more amusing than with fallen chesnuts, and to
catch Princes and Peers in your net must be more
exciting than the child's yellow butterflies ! Who
shall hope to be content if the envied of all wishes to
alter her lot ! "
" Ah ! mon ami, those who envy us do not always
know us. Among all rose-leaves there is one
crumpled ! " Her voice was saddened, the lustre of
her eyes grew languid and softened, and her fingers
unconsciously played with the diamond wedding-ring
upon her finger, as it sparkled among the roses.
Again the action spoke more eloquently than words.
Besides her fascination, she tried now- a charm more
dangerous for him she claimed his pity ! " Look ! "
she went on, as she took one of the flowers and
opened its fresh crimson leaves. " Look ! as the rose
swings in the sunhght, how lovely it is the Queen
of flowers ! And yet, at its core lies a canker ! "
n2
180 STEATHMOKE.
" Is it SO witli 0U7' Queen of Flowers ? "
He asked it involuntarily, bending lower towards
her, till lie saw the faint sigh with which her bosom
heaved, under the gossamer lace that shrouded it.
" Hush ! " she said softly, with a light blow of the
rose spray on his arm. " You must not ask. I wear
the badge of servitude and silence ! "
And silence fell between them ; such silence as
fell between Launcelot and Guenevere, when the
first subtle poison ran through the veins of the man
whom Arthur loved.
With a light laugh the silence was broken, as she
flung the gathered spray off on the sunny air, and
let her white hands wander afresh among the twining
blossoms :
" I like roses, don't you ? They are the flowers of
poetry. I don't wonder Cleopatra had her couch of
them, and the Epicureans loved them showered down
as they sat at banquet, and strewn upon the floors
ankle-deep ! They are the flowers of silence, of
revel, of love ; the flowers of the Greek poets and
the Provence Trouveres ; of the chaplets of Catullus
and the lays of Chastelar. Eoses are for all time
while they bloom afresh with every summer, how can
the earth fail to guard its eternal youth ? "
While she spoke, she drew out one of the roses
from the rest, crimson, and fresh, and fragrant, with
the dew glittering still in its odorous core ; and
broke it off with its unopened buds and dark shining
leaves.
THE GAEDEN OF KOSES. 181
" Is it not worthy Cleopatra ? " she laughed, hold-
ing it up in the light before her eyes and his his
that followed her as she fastened the rose in her
bosom with negligent grace, where it nestled half
hidden, half seen, lying against the white skin that
the tracery of the lace covered without wholly con-
cealing, and contrasting its snowy beauty with its
deep crimson petals. " Come ! we have been talking
mournfully, and I meant to teach you epicureanism
^you who trample aside the roses of life, and covet
only the withered yellow laurels of Age and Power.
Adieu ! I must leave you to finish your, solitary
promenades ; I am going in to my chocolate ! "
His eyes dwelt on her, on the rose, where it lay
half hidden on her heart, on the hair lit to gold by
the sunshine, on the antelope eyes that glanced at
him through their black lashes, on the exquisite and
voluptuous grace of her form. Though it had
fastened fetters on him which had made him this
woman's slave for life, he could not have resisted his
impulse to follow her then; she fascinated him by
the senses, and it was a fascination to which he chose
to yield. What evil could lie in it for him ? He
was strong in his own strength, secure in his own
coldness ; he believed he could handle fire without
feeling its flame ; he believed he could let the whirl-
wind sweep over him, without being stirred by its
breath; he believed he could meet the sirocco, and
not be blinded, nor staggered, nor scorched by it.
Actually, he would have called the man a lunatic
182 STEATHMOEE.
who did these thmgs: metaphorically, and quite as
dangerously, he did them all. A scornful self-confi-
dence made at once the grandeur and the weakness
of Strathmore's nature.
As Lady Vavasour turned from the parapet and
swept over the grey pavement of the rose-terrace to
re-enter the chateau, the snowy folds of her dress
gathering up the fallen crimson leaves, and her head
slightly turned over her shoulder in adieu to him, he
followed her, bending to her with a few low words :
^' Who would not learn epicureanism or any other
creed from such a teacher? You have given that
senseless rose so fair a lodging ; do not banish me
utterly! I am going to my chocolate, too; must I
take it in solitude ? For the remembrance of our
tete-a-tete meal under the limes, let us breakfast
tete-a-tete this morning ! "
The daughter of Eve had tempted him in the
garden of roses, and while yet he might have turned
away, he chose to follow and to linger with his
temptress.
183
CHAPTER XII.
IN ROYAL BROCELIANDE.
In the breakfast-room every dejeuner delicacy was
waiting, ready for such of the English guests at Yer-
non9eaux as it might pleasure to come down stairs
early. None had so pleased that morning save them-
selves, and this breakfast ivas tete-a-tete. He was
alone with her, and in that solitude she ceased to be
Lady Yavasour, whom he prejudged and mistrusted ;
she was the songstress, the incognita, the witching
waif and stray of the Bohemian lindens. Almost too
dazzling at night, with its exquisite tint, and its
singular contrast of eyes and of hair, her loveliness,
losing none of its brilliance, gained much in softness
with the morning light. Moreover, you saw then
how real was this youth, how wholly from nature this
marvellous colouring ; for, stream down on her as the
sun would, its strongest rays could never show a flaw
or a blemish.
184 STRATHMOKE.
Used to the women of Courts, no woman would
have had charm for Strathmore who had not had wit on
her hps and a finished grace in her coquetteries, and
that nameless air which the world alone gives; the
fairest hourgeoise beauty he would have passed un-
noticed, and rustic loveliness was no loveliness in his
sight.
Condemned to love, he would have made his con-
dition like Louis Quatorze, " qiion niaime mais avec
de l'^ esprit !^^ Therefore, Marion Vavasour had her
subtlest charm for him, in that exquisite grace which
empresses had envied her; in that sparkling play
which, if it were not wit, sufficed for it from such
lips ; in that very worldliness which might have
chilled as heartlessness men less petri with the world
themselves than Strathmore was. What had struck
him the night before as startling and bizarre, what
even in his momentary breathless admiration of her
had repelled him, and made him think of Clytemnestra
and La Borgia, had gone, perhaps, with the scarlet
camellias !
She was dressed simply, in snowy gossamer folds of
muslin, with floating azure ribbons here and there,
and the richness of her yellow hair, gathered back in
its natm'al waves and ripples, looked but one soft mass
of dead gold now it was unmixed with any colour.
There was nothing to mar the spells of her beauty,
and those spells she wove to her uttermost witchery
as she sat daintily brushing the bloom off a grape, or
toying with her strawberries, adding the cream to her
IN EOYAL BROCELIANDE. 185
chocolate, or touching the tiny wing of some deHcate
bird.
With all her caprices, her coquetteries, her rapid
wayward mutations, she was ever essentially feminine ;
too skilful not to know that the surest charm which a
woman wields over men is the charm of difference
the charm of sex ; and that half this charm is flown
when Christina of Sweden wears her hessians and
cracks her whip ; when her imitators of to-day chatter
slang with weeds in their mouths, and swing through
the stable-yards, talking in loud rauque voices of dogs
with a "good strain !"
They were full an hour alone, and in that hour she
led him far on a dangerous road ; none the less dan-
gerous because he knew her tactics and deemed him-
self secure to defy them. She was a coquette, there-
fore he was armed against her ; she was a woman of
the world, therefore he could trifle with her with
impunity; she was Lady Vavasour, therefore he
knew the worth of every smile, the value of every
fiance, which were but golden hooks flung out by
skill to catch and fasten the unwary : so Strathmore
jasoned he who was a man of the world, and would
lose his head for no woman ! and in his security lay
his risk. For he felt that she had already a certain
power over him the power for which he hated her
when he threw down his losing cards at ecarte the
power with which her beauty had swept over him
as he had come suddenly upon her in the sunlight of
the rose-garden ; but to have feared it would have
186 STBATHMOEE.
been to confess tliat he might yield to it, and Strath-
more held that he could evoke a storm and then arrest
it with "Thus far shalt thou go and no farther;"
he held that he could let poison flow into his veins
and then eject it with " I do not choose to receive
thee!"
The disdainful strength of the Strathmores had
ever, I say, been their weakness ; and the ruin that
had come to them had ever been wrought by their
own hand ; the graven steel of their unyielding race
ever the reed that bent beneath them.
The tete-a-tete breakfast was as seductive as any
meal ever has been since She of the Golden Shuttle
entertained the wanderer at Ogygia. Through the
shaded windows the rose-scented air stole fragrantly
in, while stray rays of sunlight streamed upon the
amber grapes touched by her delicate fingers, ,and on
the crimson rose lying hid in its snowy nest. Her
moods were as variable as summer clouds, and her
mood that morning was soft, subdued, gentle with all
its gaiety, triste with all its coquettishness, and it
was the most bewitching of all.
" What is your White Ladies like they say it is
such a superb old place ? " she said, when her mis-
chievous witticisms ceased, as though tired with their
own play and sparkle. " Charlie St. Albans who
told me your family legend, by the way, one day at
Biarritz raves about its beauty. It was an abbey,
IN ROYAL BROOELIANDE. 187
"An old Dominican monastery ^yes. It has a
beauty of its own, the beauty of that past when men
sought rest as we now seek reputation, and found in
soHtude what loe find in strife. May I not hope you
will some day honour it with a visit, Lady Vavasour,
and judge of it yourself ? " he answered her, stroking
her greyhound ; his prejudice against her was quickly
fading since he invited her to White Ladies the
daughter of Eve to the ancient Monastery !
She smiled the dazzling smile that had intoxicated
wise men to worse than the madness of the opium-
eater.
" Perhaps. Some day some day. All, what may
we all do ^some day!' You and I may be foes a
outrance some day who knows ? "
"Foes? Nay, surely not. Did you not tell me
' destiny threw us together, that we must be friends ? '
Dieu le veut!^^
"" Dieu vent ce que femme veut, mon ami!" said the
Marchioness, arching her eyebrows. " You know
that ; and on a man who disdains the love of all my
sex I am not at all inclined to waste my own friend-
ship !"
" T\^iy, you had better rather cure me of my heresy
in both. What teacher could convert me to her soft
doctrines with such success ? what rebuke could be at
once more merciful and more convincing to me ? "
A sadness, almost tenderness, shaded the dark
gazelle eyes for a moment as they met his, and she
188 STEATHMOEE.
was silent. Lady Vavasour knew the charm of
silence when the eyes may be trusted to speak. A
moment after she laughed coquettishly :
" Merciful ? Perhaps not, monsieur, if I did take
your conversion in hand."
" True. Perhaps the denial of your friendship is
more merciful than its donation would be. Never-
theless, at all risks, I will seek it."
" You love risks ? " she said, looking at him with a
dash of tantalising malice. Strathmore laughed
slightly a laugh that sounded to her like contempt
of her power.
" Well, I confess I do not fear many."
" Nor did Ragnar Ladbrog, mon ami, the northern
Scalds tell us ; sheathed in his armour of ice, what
could attack him ? How scathless he went for so
long ! And yet he came at last to his Hella, and he
languished to death in the cave of the serpents.
Take warning ! "
Strathmore smiled.
" I aan not quite so quixotic as the Bersaker, and
before I handle serpents I take out their stings !
Grasped rightly, no serpent can bite. But surely,
belle amie, you do not pay yourself so ill a compli-
ment as to compare the gift of your friendship with
the fang of an asp ? Though perhaps you are right
it may be as dangerous ! "
" But a danger you smile at ! Well, take it if
you will. Shall we be friends, then. Lord Cecil f
Her eyes were resistless in their witching softness,
IN EOYAL BKOCELIANDE. 189
and a certain tremulous smile that seemed half born
of a sigh was on her lip, as she held out in playfulness,
yet in earnest, her white jewelled hand, as she leant
slightly towards him. What man could have rejected
the haiid or the friendship ?
Strathmore bent forward and accepted both : as he
took the warm fingers within his own and met the
glance that dwelt on him as they sat there alone in the
shaded light, his pulses quickened, and his own eyes
gleamed with something of the swift dark brilliance
that she had sworn to lighten there the dawn of the
passion she had vowed to awaken in the nature that,
by character imperious and unyielding, deemed itself
by a fatal error to be also cold and calm. He released
her hand suddenly, and threw himself back in his
chair ; the doors opened, and with Beaudesert and
Clermont there entered Lord Vavasour and Vaux.
"Bon jour, messieurs," said the Marchioness, in-
cluding her lord in her negligent, graceful salutation.
" I suppose you have all been wasting the hom^s over
cheroots and novelettes that I have been mvino; to the
roses. Ah, if you were all to see the sun rise once
in a way, what a deal of good it would do you ! I
will have a Trianon, and then, perhaps, you will learn
to be pastoral. M. de Clermont, will you milk the
cow like the Comte d'Artois ? Vavasour, did I ever
tell you that it was to Lord Cecil Strathmore I
owed my escape that dreadful night at Prague?
No ? I ought to have done ; then you have never
thanked him?"
190 STRATHMOEE.
Her husband, tlms apostropliisedj turned to Stratli-
more, and addressed his thanks to him, comphmenting
him with as gracious a courtesy as that pampered,
gouty gourmet, whose general manner was guilty of
Valdor's impeachment, a " ton de garnison" could as-
sume for any mortal. " Singularly striking-looking
man quite Vandyke !" thought the Marquis, while
he uttered his gratitude for his wife's rescue ; " but I
am sure he will do something bad some day come
to a violent death, perhaps. That jjliysique ^very
much so !" Which possibly was a complacent source
of gratification to his lordship, as he had just come
in on a tete-a-tete.
Strathmore received his thanks with that cold
negligence which had the effect of making him cor-
dially disliked out of his own immediate set, and lay
back in his chair, playing' with the greyhound, and
joining now and then in the conversation. He knew
that this woman's beauty stole on him despite him-
self; when her magic was off him he hated her for
the food that she had made him give her vanity ; but
a seductive sensuousness allured him in her glorious
loveliness, which, though he rated it lightly, should
have made him place distance betwixt him and its
subtle temptation betwixt him and the wife of Lord
Vavasour.
A weak man might have done this, and been strong ;
Strathmore, a; strong man, stayed, contemptuous and
defiant of the weakness. A man less cool, less keen,
less nonchalant of all danger, might have taken warn-
k
IN KOYAL BKOCELIANDE. 191
ing ; lie saw no danger possible in it. One careless,
over-confident turn of the hand ma;)^ mar the whole
of the statue which the sculptor deems plastic as clay
to his will, obedient to every stroke of his chisel !
The statue that Strathmore at once moulded and
marred was his Life : the statue which we all, as Ave
sketch it, endow with the strength of the Milo, the
glory of the Belvedere, the winged brilliance of the
Perseus ! ^which ever lies at its best, when the chisel
has dropped from our hands, as they grow powerless
and paralysed with death, like the mutilated Torso, a
fragment unfinished and brokenj" food for the ants and
worms, buried in sands that will quickly suck it down
from sight or memory, with but touches of glory and
of value left here and there, only faintly serving to
show what might have heeuy had we had time, had we
had wisdom !
" Well, wasn't I right; isn't she divine, eh?'" said
Valdor to him that day, as they were playing bil-
liards.
" She who ? My dear fellow, there are half a
dozen divinities here who wear the cestus of Yenus,
r claim it at the least ! Be a little more definite ! "
" The deuce ! Who should I mean ? Nobody can
hold a candle to her. Vavasour's in luck to have a
wife that everybody envies him."
" Dubious luck ! " said Strathmore, sticking his
penknife through his cabana. " A wife of the first
water, like a diamond of the first water, is rather a
perilous possession. It's apt to be disputed by too
192 STRATHMOKE.
many owners! You can't ever be sure the wards
haven't been picked and the casket been rifled ! "
" Exactly," said Legard. " Marriage is a disagree-
able legal necessity for men with titles and entails,
and the best colour for a wife's discreet plainness.
No Bramah can protect you so effectually as an ugly
choice ; besides, I shouldn't think it's bad for yourself
upon principle ; if Lucretia's unlovely you must relish
Lais and her graces all the more. One never enjoys
a good omelette at Yef our's so much as after an ill-
done one in the Grisons."
" There's something in that," said Valdor, reflec-
tively. " But then twelve hours with an ugly
woman would kill one ! Why are any of them ugly?
I wonder % They were created on purpose for us.
What's the good of giving us five out of six, as we
don't like them % If they were all such as the Va-
vasour, now " And Valdor paused, in mute con-
templation of the delicious universal seraglio that
might then be commanded.
" The Vavasour's something that comes once in a
century. The deuce ! how that woman does flirt ! "
interrupted Dormer, in the tone, half disgusted, half
admiring, with which a man might say of some mag-
nificent drunkard, like Piron, " How that fellow does
drink!"
Strathmore sent his ball to make a ricocliet with a
certain impetus, as if the conversation annoyed him,
and did not join in it.
" If fifty naughty stories ain't rife about her before
IN KOYAL BROOELIANDE. 193
next season, Til bet you a thousand to one," went on
Dormer, offering his wager generally, but nobody, it
seemed, having sufficient confidence in her ladyship
to be chivalrous enough to take it up ! " They do
say it's only flirtation as yet ; and I believe she's as
heartless as ice; but she does horrible mischief, if
she's never absolutely ^ compromised,' and I think
tlms open to doubt ! At Biarritz, last year, she played
the very deuce with Marc Lennartson ; you remember
him, don't you, Strathmore Austrian Cuirassiers,
you know ? She drew him on and on, made him follow
her about like a greyhound, fooled him before every-
body, and then turned him off coolly for the Prince
de Vorhn, and laughed at him with a blow of her fan.
Lennartson had lost his head about her, and he shot
himself through the brain ! I know that for a fact ; no-
thing but that woman at the bottom of it ; and the
very night she heard of his death she went to a fancy
ball, fluttering about in her diamonds. By Jove ! it
was too bad, wasn't it ? "
Strathmore made a hap-hazard cannon, with his
coldest sneer upon his face : the story angered him.
" My dear Dormer ! if a man's such a fool as to
^follow a woman about like a lapdog,' whether he
goes out of the world or stays in it doesn't matter very-
much, I think. Yours is a romantic story ; it would
charm the women, but, pour moi I I must fancy there
were some heavy debts hanging over Lennartson'$
head, or some more rational reason for your senti-
VOL. I.
194 STEATHMOBE.
mental finale. I don't credit those things quite so
easily."
" It was true, whether you like to believe it or
not."
Strathmore lifted his eyebrows and dropped the
subject ; he would have said it did not interest him !
" What a voice of lamentation there was in Ramah
when Yavasour married her," said Beaudesert, who
was betting on the game. " The women had made
such hard running on him all over Europe ; when
the regular troops had always missed fire, it was a
horrid blow to have an outside skirmisher knock him
over
!
" Of course ! Virtuous women love to take in
hand the conversion of a sinner when the penitent
can give them a coronet ; they are very happy to be
taken, hke soda-water after a debauch, if the de-
bauchee excuses his past orgies with a page in Burke,
There wasn't a pr^cieitse in England that wouldn't
have sold her pure soul to the devil and the Marquis^
for his settlements. The morals of monde, and demi-
monde, don't differ very much, after all, only the
inferior goods are content with Kue de la Paix
jewellery, and Lady Yavasour et C'^ don't let them-
selves go under anything less than the family dia-
monds ! " said Strathmore, with his coldest sneer. It
gratified him to fling the sarcasm at that marriage of
convenience where Helen of the antelope eyes had
bartered herself for the gold and the titles of gour-
mand Menelaus ; the flash and sparkle of the diamond
IN ROYAL BEOCELIANDE. 195
circlet he had seen among the roses, added, by its
memory, point to his irony.
" Quite right ! " laughed Beaudesert. " And when
we have to pay such a much heavier price to monde,
and get so much better amused by demi-monde, how
the deuce can they wonder we prefer ease to imprison-
ment, and laissez-faire to il faut faire ? "
" Perhaps they don^t wonder, my good fellow, and
in that lies the essence of their pique and the root of
their philippics. If the debatable land's so agreeable,
they know very well the time may come when the
legitimate kingdoms will be left altogether," laughed
Strathmore, as he went back to his game, and. Lady
Vavasour not being there to spoil it, won it, as he
piqued himself on winning most things that he tried
for in life, from billiards upwards.
As he finished it, a servant entered to tell him that
the horses were coming round ; he had promised to
make one of a riding-party at four o'clock, and left
the billiard-room with Dormer to obey the summons.
"The pretty panther, how handsome she looks!
She has merciless griffes^ though, and her graceful
play's death to those who play with her," said Dormer,
under his moustaches, memories of Biarritz rising
savagely within him as they passed out of the long
gallery leading from the billiard-room into the great
hall.
The " pretty panther," as he called her, was just
at that moment standing on the grand staircase with
some men about her, holding her jewelled whip in
o2
19G STEATHMORE.
one hand, and the violet folds of her habit in the
other, the light from the long range of stained windows
falling on her, and on the tapestried arras, the da-
mascened armour, and the dark oak carvings of the
wall behind her. Strathmore glanced at her, and gave
Dormer his coldest laugh.
" Fearfully poetic you are to-day. Will ! Have
you been scratched yourself ? "
" No ; but you're about to be."
" / ? You don't know me much, my good fellow."
" But I know HER, and I bet you five to one that
she is trying to play the deuce with you, Strathmore.''
" Let her try ! I have one bet pending already on
that event, but I'm quite willing to take yours too."
" Glad to hear it; but forewarned' s forearmed, you
know."
" Thank you," said Strathmore, with that negligent
coldness which was as chilly as ice, " but when I
need counsel I ask for it, my dear Dormer. It is a
dish I am not very fond of having offered me."
His eyes had lightened to the swift dark anger of
his race ; and Dormer, a good-natured, easy, indolent
fellow, accustomed to be put down by him, and to be
silenced by his sneer, held his peace with an obedience,
the relic of their old Eton days; while Strathmore
joined the group on the staircase, and, by a non-
chalant finesse, displaced the others, who had a prior
claim as before him in the field, and leading her out
into the court, assisted Lady Vavasour to mount
the spirited Spanish mare that he had admired as it
IN ROYAL BKOCELIANDE. 197
had reared with her, when he had seen the riding-
party from the distance the previous day. Assistance,
indeed, she needed little; an inimitable rider, she
sprang, lightly as a bird to a bough, to her saddle ;
but to have the foot beautiful as Pompadour's placed
on his hand, the light weight leant upon him for an
instant, the perfumed hair brush near him, the hand
touch his as he put the reins within it, the lips softly
thank him, these made a service bitterly envied to
Strathmore. As she dashed out of the great gates
of the court, the mare rearing and plunging with the
fire of its Spanish blood. Lady Vavasour had never
looked, perhaps, lovelier, with her delicate cheeks
flushed from the exertion of her strength, her light,
defiant laugh ringing out, her eyes flashing with im-
patient will. Yet for one moment as he saw her
teeth clench tightly, her eyes gather a sinister light,
her whip cut the mare with sharp, stinging strokes, it
crossed Strathmore's mind that the real instinct, the
true 'pleasure of this soft, dazzling woman might be,
after all. Cruelty the cruelty of the young cat that
loves to see the wounded bird flutter and shriek and
struggle for its liberty with the blood dabbling the
broken v^dng, and to let it go for one fleet mocking
moment, and then to seize on it afresh, till the death-
cry rings sharp and clear upon the air, and its own
white teeth tear asunder the quivering flesh.
The fancy crossed him, and the aversion, amount-
ing to almost the strength of hatred, which, mingled
with the fascination that Marion Vavasour had for
198 STRATHMORE.
him, flamed up in all its bitterness. " She danced in
her diamonds the night that poor devil shot himself!'*
he thought; "I dare say. What fools men are to
let a woman play with them."
But twenty minutes after, Lady Vavasour turned
her head towards him with her brightest smile.
" Lord Cecil, you are our cicerone ; which way leads
to the Breche du Gaston ? " And as he spurred his
horse to overtake her, and cantered on by her side,
the wiser thought was forgot, the danger that was in
this woman served but to give piquance to her beauty,
as the thorns of the rose which pique those who
admire to gather it ; and as though she had divined
the verdict that his reason was given against her, she
chained him to her side during the ride, and had all
that softness of manner which, when she chose to
assume it, would have made the testimony of men and
angels weigh nothing against Marion Lady Vavasoin* !
"So, if I come to England this year, as Lady
Beaudesert tries to persuade me, you will be pre-
pared to do me the honours of Wliite Ladies ? " she
said, laughing, to him an hour afterwards, as, having
outstripped the rest of the party, they rode through a
waggon-way that ran under the shelter of the hills,
with the wild vine clustering in rich luxuriance from
bough to bough, and the glowing lights slanting in,
to turn the moss into gold, and burnish the ripening
grapes into bloom.
" But too gladly ! Since the Reine Blanche was
received there the Abbey will never have sheltered
so fair a guest. But Mary Stuart came to us as a
I
IN EOYAL BROOELIANDE. 199
captive ; you will come as a captor omnipotent !
Your sceptre rests on a sway that men cannot break,
and your kingdom lies in a power more potent than
mailed might ! "
"Ah!" she said, softly and mournfully, "but don't
you know the Reine Blanche had my sceptre and my
kingdom too, and yet her hair whitened and her
head was bent to the block ! She was a captive at
White Ladies ? and I dare say my lord of Strath-
more was a courtly but a pitiless gaoler, had many a
courtier phrase upon his tongue, but never relented to
mercy! What a triste souvenir! I shall be afraid
to come there ; perhaps you will imprison me ! "
Strathmore bent down in his saddle and looked into
her eyes, while his own grew dark and brilliant, and
the coldness of his face softened. Was it the warmth
flung on it from above by the amber sunlight that
was streaming through the vine-leaves and the
purpling grapes ?
" That I shall be tempted, I would not deny ! Who
could, who spoke truth ? "
The reins drooped on their horses' necks, they
paced slowly over the yielding mosses, their speed
slackening, their voices softening, imder the leafy
boughs and the tangled tendrils of the drooping
vines ; the warm sun fell between the stems of the
trees, the leaves were stirless in the sultry air, the
birds sang with subdued music in the woodland
shadow and they rode onwards, as in the days of
the past, Launcelot and Guenevere rode through the
silent aisles and forest shades of Royal Broceliande.
200
CHAPTER XIII.
THE WEAVING OF THE GOLDEN SHUTTLE.
Bertie Erroll sat at the head of the dinner-
table at White Ladies with other spirits like himself,
keeping the house open, as he had been bidden to do
by his absent host in the first week of September.
Dinner was just over, and the Sabreur lay back in
his chair, lazily peeling a nectarine, recommending
the Marcobrunn to Langley of the Twelfth, vowing
it was deucedly warm, and lamenting / pathetically
that Strathmore would prefer the click of the
roulette-ball to the glories of the open, the pleasures
of pair et passe to those of the stubble, and forsake
White Ladies thus perpetually for the Continent.
Some half-dozen men were down with him for the
shooting ; Strathmore had always bade him look on
White Ladies as though it were his ov^ti home, to
open to whom he would ; and they were chatting
over their grapes, peaches, and comet wines this
THE WEAVING OF THE GOLDEN SHUTTLE. 201
warm, mellow September evening, while the last
rajs of the setting sun fell across Erroll's fair frank
face as they slanted through the painted windows of
the dining-hall, where the scutcheon of the Strath-
mores was blazoned, with their merciless motto,
" ^lag ! anlr spare not ! *^ radiant in gold and gules.
"We don't want women in September," Rockingham
of the Guards was observing, with more truth, perhaps,
than politeness. " They're delightful in their season,
but when we're shooting we're better without 'em.
Paullet took Valerie Brown and that lot down to
Market Harborough last season, and we were posi-
tively ruined by 'em ! Champagne suppers at two
in the morning, and all the rest of it, put us shock-
ingly out of condition; we were hardly in at a
death, any one of us, all thanks to those confounded
women "
"Ph}Tne V. the Pytchley! St. John's Wood
morals spoiling Northamptonshire runs ! You should
write a ' Tract for the Times ' on it ; a ^ Warning to
the Pink not to trifle with the Rouge, ' " laughed the
Sabreur, pouring himself out some Rhenish. ^' Well,
thank God, I'd suffer deterioration any day from
that quarter. A bright-eyed brune is better than
a brush any day, and two good things can't spoil
one another. I say, Phil, did you see in the papers
that Jack Temple's run away with Ferrar's wife ? "
"Never read the papers, my good fellow," said
Danvers. " Froth in the leaders, gall in the debates,
acid in the on dits, and flummery in the court news,
202 STEATHMORE.
make an olla podrida that don't suit my digestion.
Poor Jack! what could he be thinking of? She
weighs nine stone, and is shockingly sallow in the
dayhght ^"
Danvers stopped, the dogs gave tongue, the man
handing the coffee round paused in his duty, Waverley
looked up from his olives, Rockingham dropped half
a dozen almond soufflees on to a terrier's nose, ErroU
sprang from his chair : " My dear fellow ! By Jove !
how glorious ! " And, as the groom of the chambers
flung the door wide open, Strathmore entered his own
dining-hall, unannounced and unexpected.
" Keep your seat, old fellow ! You or I, what
does it matter which ? " he laughed, as he shook the
Sabreur's hand, and forced him back into the chair
at the head of the table, looking on his old Eton
chum with a warmer glance than women had ever
won from him, as the other men gathered round to
greet him. " How are you all 1 Who's shockingly
sallow by the daylight, Phil ? Nobody you've brought
down here, I hope, is it ? Sit where you are, Bertie.
I'm your guest to-night, sil vous plait !^^
With which Strathmore, refusing to take the head
of his table, and looking with eyes of love upon Erroll,
sank into an empty chair, told the servants to bring
him some soup, and sat down at White Ladies as
though he had never left it. He had arrived only
some half -hour before, but had gone straight up to
his own room, forbidding the groom of the chambers
to disturb the dinner-party by announcing his arrival.
THE WEAVING OF THE GOLDEN SHUTTLE. 203
^^ My dear old fellow, this is prime ! How are you,
Cis?" said Erroll, lying back to look at Stratlimore
with an unutterable satisfaction, fully content to give
up his pro tempo ownership of White Ladies to see
his friend back again.
" All right, old boy. You're astonished to see me
to-night, Bertie?"
" By Jove I am ! I thought you were at Baden ? "
"I ivas at Baden. I only left on Tuesday, and
shouldn't have left then but I had asked some people
here, and given them caj^te blanche to fix their own
time, and they fixed it at such a short notice, that I
had only just days enough to come over to receive
them. It wasn't worth while to write, as I should
have come with the mail-bag."
"Are there any women coming?" asked Rocking-
ham, with prophetic pitie de soi-meme,
"Some. Why?"
"Nothing, only I hate the sex in September,"
muttered the unlucky victim to Valerie Brown and
" that lot " in the shires. " So your Jack of Trumps
colt didn't win the Prix du Foret Noir?"
"No; only came a good third. I rode Starlight
myself for the Rastatt; we did the distance very
nicely."
"By Jove you did, and gave Ninette a dress of
your colours, I saw in the Post How's the pretty
houquetiere?"
" Handsome as ever. She asked for you, Erroll ;
I don't think there's one of the Jockey Club who cuts
204 STRATHMORE.
you out with her. She looked very charming in the
scarlet and white. A poor devil of an Englishman
shot himself on Monday night, after losing his last
Nap, but all Baden was too occupied with Prin-
cesse Marie Volgarouski's desperate engouement of
a young Tuscan composer to pay much attention.
It's quite Pauline Bonaparte and Blangini over again.
She's a striking looking woman, but I don't care for
those Petersburg beauties, they're too olive."
" Ah, by George, Strath ! you put me in mind,"
interrupted Erroll, with all the eagerness of a retriever
scenting a wild duck "you said you saw Lady
Vavasour in Paris ?"
"So I did."
"Well! What's she like? Have you seen her
again?"
" Oh yes. She's been staying at Vernon9eaux."
" The deuce she has ! and you never said so f
What do you think of her how do you Hke her
what style ?"
"My dear fellow, don't ask me to describe a
woman !" interrupted Strathmore, indifferently.
"They are like kaleidoscopes, and have a thousand
phases, all pretty for the time, but never to be caught,
and always changed when a new eye's on them."
"Hang you!" swore Erroll. "You wrote just
enough to intriguer one about her, and now shove one
off with an epigram ! Come, is she the atrocious
coquette they all say?"
THE WEAVING OF THE GOLDEN SHUTTLE. 205
" All women are coquettes, except plain ones, who
make a virtue of a renunciation that's de rigueur, and
hate their virtue (like most other people) while they
brag of it!"
" Confound you ! I don't ask about all women,
only about one. You set out with a dreadful preju-
dice against her ; you'd seen her at one masked ball,
and wrote me word on the strength of it that you
thought it particularly lucky that the Marquis was of
elastic principles, and that you didn't envy him his
wife, because her mouth, though perfection, would
whisper too many infidelities to please you !"
A dark shadow of impatient, intolerant annoyance
passed over Strathmore's face, and glanced into his
eyes for an instant as the sun fell on it, slanting
through the ** ^h^ ! mti Spart not !'* of the motto
blazoned on the painted panes; but there was no
trace left of anger as he looked up and laughed
slightly.
"I dare say it is particularly lucky the Marquis
has elastic conjugal principles; it's lucky for any
husband who has a handsome wife, and yet likes to
live in peace with his brethren. Lady Vavasour is a
very exquisite beauty, there's no disputing that; you'll
rave of her, Bertie ; at the same time, I never heard
beauty reckoned as the best guarantee for marital
fidelity!"
"The devil not exactly!" said Scrope Waverley.
"The Vavasour's the most abominable coquette
206 STRATHMOBE.
shocking, on my honour, isn't she, Strathmore ? Be
warm as the tropics on you one minute, and cold as
the poles the next."
Strathmore looked at him with his chilliest con-
tempt :
" Perhaps you have suffered ! Acrimony generally
bespeaks adversity. Not having been the subject of
her ladyship's caprices, I cannot compare notes with
you, Scrope, nor yet back your experience, though
in your case I don't doubt any part of them, except
that you ever basked much in the tropics !"
Waverley looked sulky as he picked over his olives,
not quite certain how to take the shot that had told
in a very sore spot ; while Erroll, ever good natured,
and who could no more take pleasure in making a
man smart than a dog wince, turned the subject, and
postponing his own curiosity, asked Strathmore who
the people were that were coming ?
" Who ? Oh, some of the Vernon^eaux set," an-
swered Strathmore, taking a Manilla out of the little
silver waggon. "The De Ruelles, the Beaudeserts,
Madame de Cevillac, your old friend Lady Camelot,
and Lady Yavasour."
He paused a moment before he added her name,
but then spoke it indifferently enough.
"The Yavasour!" echoed Erroll and all the other
men with him. "By Jove ! Strath, you don't mean it ! "
" Why should I not mean it ? "
"The Yavasom'? By Heaven!" ejaculated the
THE WEAVING OF THE GOLDEN SHUTTLE. 207
Sabreur, stroking his moustache in beatified astonish-
ment. " I thought you didn't like her, Cis ?"
" 1 don*t think I ever said so 1 De plus, she in-
vited herself, and reigning beauties are like reigning
fashions one must obey them."
" Does the Marquis come too ? "
" God forbid ! At least, he comes for a day or
two, but only en route to the Sprudel to cure his
dyspepsia. Like the Roman, he goes to a bath that
he may come back for a banquet."
"And leaves his wife a droit de chasse in his
absence ? " laughed Erroll. " But the idea of keep-
ing that to yoiu'self all this time, letting us talk of
her and never telling us ! What an odd fellow you
are ! You called her a sorceress, and said she tried
her wiles on you at the Luilhiers's ball. Has she
bewitched even you, old fellow ? "
" Not exactly ! " said Strathmore his tone was
more contemptuously cold than he had ever used to
Erroll " but I hke beauty as I like a good Titian, a
good claret, a good opera, a good racer. Who
doesn't ? To hear you, Bertie, one would certainly
thuik no woman had ever been entertained at White
Ladies since Mary Stuart! If Lady Vavasoui*
wished to come here with Beatrix Beaudesert, could
I say I wouldn't have her ? Besides, 1 had no wish
to say so ; she is very charming. By-the-by, Phil,
who was that you were talking about when I came
in? Who's sallow in the daylight? most blondes
are that, though, after twenty."
208 STKATHMOEE.
He spoke so carelessly, as he lay back in his chair,
that not a man present guessed that the name of
Marion Vavasour was anything more to him than
the names of fifty fair women, who had been, season
after season, recipients of the stately hospitalities of
White Ladies : except, indeel, Erroll, who looked at
him with a puzzled look clouding his clear azure
eyes, and drank his coffee in silence. He, the sworn
Squire of Dames, who worshipped everything feminine
that crossed his path, felt a vague dislike rise up in
him against this witching beauty, whom Strathmore
denied had had charm for him, and yet who was
bidden beneath the roof of White Ladies.
That night, when they had left the smoking-room,
Strathmore, sitting alone in his own room, thought-
ful yet listless, with a restless indifference which had
grown on him of late, and which he had vainly
doctored with very heavy betting at Baden, and
dangerous coups de hasard at roulette, threw open
his despatch-box and took out a little note a note
which was not very many lines, which placed his
title before his name, and which was chiefly gay,
mischievous badinage and pretty command, with
but here and there touches of something deeper, and
these only deepened to friendship. Yet this letter
had sufficed to bring him from Baden at its bidding ;
it had been looked at many times, where no other
note addressed to him had ever served for any other
purpose than to light his cigar, and it had a fascina-
tion for him which no words written by a woman's
THE WEAVING OF THE GOLDEN SHUTTLE. 209
hand had ever claimed, for it was signed " Marion
Vavasour and Vaux." Letters have a strange gla-
mour ! with this, the sweet mocking voice echoed
in his ear, the smile of the dark antelope eyes laughed
into his, the fragrance of the amber hair floated past
him, and he flung the note back into its resting-place
with a fierce oath he hated the senseless paper !
For he hated the hot, insidious passion that was
creeping into his blood, and that, in night and soli-
tude, wreathed round him as the serpent folds round
the Liiocoon, sapping his strength, and only twisting
closer and closer with each effort to thrust it aside ;
the passion that would make him the slave of a
woman, the vassal of a smile, the bond-servant of a
kiss!
In the simplest trifles Strathmore was remarkable
for an unswerving tenacity to truth, too proud a man
not to hold his word his bond even in ordinary collo-
quial intercourse; yet that night, when denying to
Erroll that she had any sway over him, he had for
the only time in his life lied. It was the first trivial
unnoticed step of the downward course that he was
even now commencing, as the first unperceived
loosening of the snow is the signal for the down-
ward sweep of the avalanche.
Marion Vavasour had a power over him such as no
woman had ever gained before her ; the strange force
with which absolute hatred of her mingled with the
charm her beauty had for him, served only to heighten
it and give it a sting which excited and enthralled a
VOL. I. p
210 STEATHMORE.
man whom a tamer or wiser love would never have
governed. Strathmore had stayed on at Vernon-
^eaux, voluntarily remaining in the danger, which a
weaker man would, or might, at least, have fled from
while there was yet time ; finding in this new beguile-
ment, this woman's intoxicating loveliness, a spell,
subtle and resistless, the same dazzling, sensuous delight
as lies in a soft Bacchante of Coustou's golden chisel,
or a voluptuous reveuse warm with the rich varied
colours of the canvas of Greuze. Constantly in her
society, meeting her alone in the freshness of the
early morning, strolling with her at evening under
the trellised roofing of the vines, bowing to the sway
of her coquetries in the salon where she held her gay
omnipotent reign, Strathmore did not dispute the
"destiny" which she had said had decreed them to
be friends.
For him, too, she had her most certain and most
dangerous charm : capricious, mutable, scattering her
coquetries a pleines mains, as the Hours of Corregio
scatter their roses ; she had a softness, a sadness, a
tenderness, / call it she termed it a " friendship "
for and with Strathmore which seemed to bespeak that
something warmer than vanity, something deeper
than mere pride of conquest, might be awakened in
her. Amidst the largesse of adoration that she levied
from all who came within sight of lier brilliant
banner, which fluttered with its audacious motto,
" Je regne partoutj^ from north to south, from east
to west, she made a distinction towards the man who
THE WEAVING OF THE GOLDEN SHUTTLE. 211
had saved her life at the Vigil of St. John, which
gave good ground for attributing a preference that
every man, from Monsignore Villaflor downwards,
bitterly envied him as they began to yield place to
him as of necessity, and to couple his name with
hers in the card-room or smoking-room, when neither
he nor the Marquis were present. The latter was
the only one at Yernon^eaux who never troubled
his head which way his Marchioness's caprices might
be turning ; it was a matter of profound indifference
to him, and he dozed, and read French novels, and
played ecarte, and discussed Vart de gout, and let his
wife go on her oya\ ways, like a gentleman of breed-
ing who did as he would be done by.
Half hating her, half beguiled by her, one hour
accrediting to her all the velvet treachery, the wanton
cruelty of the panther ; the next, subdued by that
charm which he had little wish and less will to resist ;
one instant, bitterly contemptuous on the witchery
that made his pulse beat quicker at the mere fra-
grance of a woman's hair ; another seeking with all
the skill the world had taught him, to make the
softened glance of her eyes deepen into tenderness ;
so the golden shuttle of a woman's power had woven
its woof and wound its web around Strathmore, and
so he had courted, even while he rebelled from, its
enchanted toils. And just at the very moment when
the surest meshes of its twisted threads were entangling
round him, when he was first beginning to feel it a
necessity to be in her presence ^just then, Lady
p2
212 STEATHMORE.
Vavasour left Vernon9eaux. Without announcement,
without preparation, she went; carefully avoiding
any tete-a-tete farewell, bidding him " au revoir " with
laughing negligence in a crowded salon, with an in-
difference which Strathmore was not slow to simulate
in imitation. Yet that adieu, by its very avoidance
of him, by its very abandonment of that tendresse
which she used as her habitual weapon of war, told
him, by his experience of women, might equally mean
one of two things : that she felt nothing, or felt too
much I Which ?
The question was left open, and pursued him cease-
lessly ; nothing in his life had ever haunted him so
persistently as that single doubt. I believe that weeks,
months spent in her presence, would not have rooted
her in his memory so firmly as that well-timed absence,
that insoluble uncertainty. Away from her, it was in
vain that he contemned, as he did with bitter irony,
with pitiless rancour, her coquetries and her caprices ;
or mercilessly dissected her faults, her foibles, and
her fascinations : her power had begun ! Insecurity
is to passion as the wind to the flame without the
cold breeze wafted to it, the embers would have faded
fast, and never flared up into life ; with the rush of
the cooler air the fire leaps into flame, and its lust is
not sated till it has destroyed all before it.
The Strathmores of White Ladies had never loved
the women who had slept innocently on their hearts,
and laid their pure lives within their keeping; the
THE WEAVING OF THE GOLDEN SHUTTLE. 213
only passion that had ever roused them had been some
fierce forbidden desire, and the guilty leaven of the
dead race was alive in the man who bore their name
and their features. From Vernon9eaux Strathmore
went to Baden, and if any feeling was strong in him
towards the woman whose beauty, when the scarlet
flowers bound her amber hair, had made him think of
Fredegonde, of Sifrid, of Lucrezia, of every living
Circe who had drawn men downward by the witching
gleam of her white arms till they lost all likeness of
themselves, and sank into an abyss whence they could
never more rise again into the pure light left for ever
at her bidding, he would have said, and perhaps said
rightly, that it was hatred. If pity be akin to love,
believe me passion is as often allied to hate ! It
would slay what it vainly covets ; if it cannot kiss the
lips it woos, it would blur them out of all beauty by
a blow ; what it seeks so fiercely, it loathes for the
pain of its own unslaked desire ; and what it is forbid-
den to enjoy, it would thrust away out of its own and
other eyes, into the darkness of an absolute or of a
hving death, with the hatred of Amnon, to the tomb
of Heloise !
Such was the passion now wakening in Strathmore ;
which, whilst it made him hate the woman who fasci-
nated and blinded him, because he knew that the
softness of such hours as that upon the rose -terrace
was but a more fatal phase of her brilliant and studied
coquetries, were but the shadows which, with a cun-
214 STRATHMOKE.
ning art, she threw in to heighten a dazzling picture ;
had still made him leave Baden the instant that the
note he now flung aside had reached him the note
which accepted his invitation afresh, and selected
White Ladies from amidst a hundred other places
that were open to the honour of her ladyship's bright
and sovereign presence.
In his own room that night he read over the delicate
fragrant letter that had made him leave Baden (and
would have made him leave Paradise !), and with an
oath threw it away from him, as though it were
tainted with poison. He hated the mad fool's delight
that lay in it for him because her hand had touched
it, yet he longed with ungovernable desire to feel that
hand lie once more within his own ; and Strathmore,
who held that he could mould his life like plastic clay
into any shape that pleased him, did not seek to
inquire whether the clay would break or harden in
the fire which was beginning to seethe and coil
around it.
As he flung the letter away and rose, he pulled
back the curtains of the window nearest him, and
threw one of its casements open. He felt impatient
for the air, impatient with himself, intolerant with
all the world ! The night was very hot, and he stood
looking out for a while into the moonlight. The
scene was lovely enough, and the old monastic lands,
as far as he could see, were his own ; but Strathmore,
absorbed in his own thoughts, looked little at the
THE WEAVING OF THE GOLDEN SHUTTLE. 215
landscape. It was a mere hazard that the figure of a
man crossing the turf caught his eye.
" A poacher as near the house as that ; impossible !
That Knightswood gang are the very deuce for
audacity, but even they'd never " he thought, as
he leaned out to get a good look at the intruder ; in
the clear white light the form, though distant, was
distinct enough, and the red end of a cigar, as it
moved through the gloom, sparkled like a glow-
worm.
Strathmore looked hard at the mysterious shadow,
till it had gone out of the moonlight into the deep
shade of a cluster of elms.
"By Jove! Erroll, as I live! Another of my
tenants' daughters come to grief, I suppose ! What
a fellow it is ; if he's away from Phya of the Bijou
Villa, he takes up with Phyllis of the Home-farm !
I wonder how cider tastes, faulting champagne?
Eather flat, and terribly homely, I should fancy;
better than nothing, though, I suppose, for the
Sabreur. Well, it's a very nice night for an erotic
adventure. Byron's quite right
The devil's in the moon for mischief ;
there is not a day,
The longest, not the twenty-first of June,
Sees half the business in a wicked way
On which three single hours of moonshine smile
And then she looks so modest all the while !
He might have said, too, that in that respect the
women who make the mischief are like the moon that
216 STRATHMORE.
looks on it! Chaste Diana of the skies, or of the
sex, only veils that she may lend herself to some-
thing naughty!"
With which reflection Strathmore shut the window
down and rang for his Albanian, giving no more
thought to ErrolFs moonlight errand. Long after-
wards, when it formed a link in that chain which his
own passions forged about his life, the remembrance
of this September night came back to him.
217
CHAPTER XIV.
FEATHERY SEEDS THAT WERE FREIGHTED WITH
FRUIT OF THE FUTURE,
" It was a fine moonlight night last night, my
dear fellow, and Hampshire ' moonrakers ' do go fish-
ing after contraband goods, au clair de la lune, but I
didn't know you belonged to the fraternity, Bertie,"
said Strathmore, the next evening, as they walked
home brushing through the ferns, after a good day
out in the open.
Erroll turned with a certain dismay ; though in
the teeth of a convicted wickedness he would stroke
his moustache with the blandest plait-ilf look of
innocence, he was thrown a little off his guard, and
confidence was such a habit with him with Strath-
more, that it was difficult to get out of it.
" The deuce. Strath, you're as bad as a detective ! "
he mm-mm-ed, plaintively. "Where did you see me ? "
" Where you were very easily to be seen, my dear
218 STRATHMOEE.
fellow, as I told you once before. If you walk about
in the open air, as large as life, with a cigar in your
mouth, I can't understand how you can very judici-
ously expect to go imseen, myself ! What have you
got about you, Erroll, to confer invisibility? You
seem to expect it as your prerogative ! "
" Bosh ! " interrupted Bertie, striking a fusee.
"But, by the way, my dear Cis, how came you to
be looking at the moonlight last night? That isn't
your line at all."
" Thank God, no ! Who will may have the moon-
rays for me : we can spend the night much more
pleasantly than by looking at it ! Who is she, mon
cher? Such nocturnal depredations are poaching on
my manor-rights ; however, I don't grudge tliem to
you. Katie or Jeanneton may make a very pretty
picture with a broken pitcher or a gleaner's bundle
for Mulready or Meissonnier, but in real life ^no,
thank you ! No Psyche can lie on a hard pallet
under a thatched roof. Bah ! I thought better of
you, Sabreur!"
Erroll laughed and didn't defend himself, but he
looked a trifle thoughtful and wonied for so insigni-
ficant an affair as a provincial amow^ette, which to
that universal conqueror was usually something what
knocking over a swallow with a stone, might be to
a splendid shot, after the best bouquets of prime
battues.
" Don't say anything about it, there's a good old
fellow ! " he said, carelessly, after a moment's pause
FRUIT OF THE FUTUKE. 219
a pause apparently of some hesitation and indecision
on a subject on wliicli lie seemed tempted to speak
fully.
" Did I say anything about the other, last
summer? If I were a man, now, who liked cab-
bage-roses, I should try my droits de seigneur, and
turn you out from your monopoly. But on my life,
Bertie, I don't understand your village liaisons,"
went on Strathmore, thinking no more about the
matter than that Erroll's equal worship of Eros,
whether the little god of miscliief lived under a
lean-to roof, or a ceiling painted after Fragonard,
was not his own line of action, and seemed an
unintelligible elasticity of taste. "'A Gardener's
Daughter ' and ' Jacqueline la Bouquetiere ' look very
well in poetry and painting ; so do rags and tatters ;
but, in real life, I can no more fancy making love
to them, than taking to a beggar's clothes by choice.
Love's born of the senses ; then why the deuce take
Love where half his senses must be shocked ? "
''L^ amour est niveleur!''^ laughed Erroll, a little
more absent still than usual. "He's the only real
republican, the only sincere socialist going, my dear
Cis ; he won't complain where you take him so long
as he has a soft nest in a white breast, and can talk
in his own tongue ! What do you know about him ?
You only 'make love' languidly to some grande
dame, who blinds him with sandal-wood and stifles
him in lace^; or some Champs Elys^es Aspasia, who
di^enches his wings with vin mosseux, smothers him in
220 STRATHMOBE.
cachemires, kills him with mots, and sells him for rou-
leaux! Your god isn't the god ! "
" My dear fellow, will you tell me in what religion
my god is ever the god according to my neighbour's
orthodoxy ? " said Strathmore. " I say, Bertie, didn't
you lose a good deal at the Spring Meetings'? I
told you that miserable bay was worth nothing."
Erroll laughed gaily.
" I did drop a good deal, but I cleared a few
hundreds after at Goodwood, that put things a little
square. Things always right themselves : worry's
like a woman, who, if she sees she's no effect, leaves
off plaguing you. Bills, like tears, are rained down
on you if they disturb you an inch, but, if you're
immovable to both, you see no more of either ! "
" Comfortable creed ! I never knew, though, that
the unpaid and the unloved w^ere quite so soon
daunted ! But, Bertie, you promised me that that
if ^"
"My dear old fellow, I know I did ! " broke in the
Sabrem\ "If I were in any mess for money, I
would tell you frankly, and take from you as cheer-
fully as you'd lend "
" Parole d'honneur ? "
" Parole d'honneur ! Won't that satisfy you ? "
" No ! I want to free you from those beggarly
Jews. You might let me have my own whim here.
Name any interest to me you like a hundred per
cent., if that will please you ^but only ^"
" Sign a bond that you'd tear in two and scatter to
FKUIT OF THE FUTURE. 221
the windsj or thrust in the fire as soon as it was
written ! You served me that trick once," muttered
Erroll; but his eyes grew soft with a grateful and
cordial light as he looked at Strathmore. " Old
fellow, you knoiv how I thank you ; but I can't let
you have your whim here, though you're as true as
steel, Strath, God bless you ! I say, what does Paris
think of Graziella ? She's not worth half they rave
of her in the Guards' Box, and her ankles are so
atrociously thick ! "
" The deuce they are ! She owes everything to her
face ; her pas de seul w^ould never be borne in public,
onl}^ she's so extremely handsome for a pas de deux
in private ! Carlotta has ten times more grace ; but
Carlotta got a claque against her from the first ; she
began by being virtuous, and, though she's seen the
error of her ways, the imprudence will never be
forgiven her. Virtue is as detrimental in the
Coulisses as Honesty on 'Change ! The professors
of either soon get hissed down for such an eccentric
innovation, and tire of its losing game before the
sibilation ! "
With which truism upon Life and Virtue, Strath-
more walked on through the ferns, talking with
Erroll of the topics of the hour, from the carte of
the coming policies of Europe, to the best site for a
new tan-gallop. That evening, as they strolled home-
wards in the mellow sunset, smoking and chatting,
while Our Lady's bells chimed slowly and softly over
w^oodland and cornland, over river and valley, in the
222 STEATHMOEE.
Curfew cliant, was the last hour in which they enjoyed,
untainted, the free, frank, hon camarade communion of
a friendship that was closer than brotherhood and
stronger than the tie of blood. It was the last before
a woman laid the axe to its root.
And even now their conversation lagged, and their
voices dropped to silence, as the thoughts of both were
occupied by her whom neither named ErroU musing
with an impatient curiosity, a prophetic prescience of
distrust, on this sorceress-beauty which men attributed
to the Marchioness of Vavasour and Yaux, yet which
his friend averred had assailed him no more than the
lifeless perfection of some Titian chef-d'oeuvre ; and
Strathmore thinking of the hour, now near, when her
hand should touch his, when the light of her eyes should
glance on him again, when his own roof should shelter
the loveliness which was fast shattering to the dust
the proud panoply of his chill philosophies, and whose
seductive sweetness had stolen into his life unperceived,
from the first night that he had looked by the light
of the spring stars on the blonde aux yeux noirs in
Bohemia.
That evening Lady Vavasour drove through Paris ;
she had been staying with the Court at Compiegne,
and was here but for a day or two in her favourite
residence, which was peerless among cities as herself
amidst womanhood. She and Paris both brilliant,
sparkling, proud, without rival in their path, Vith their
days one brilliant fete de triomphe, and their sovereign
FKUIT OF THE FUTURE. 225
sceptre wi*eatlied with flowers, suited and resembled
each other the Queen of Cities and the Queen of
Fashion ! And if in the Past and Future of the
woman, as in the Past and Future of the citj, there
were cruelties which teemed with the ferocity of the
tigress, lustful vanities which rioted with the licence
of a Faustina, dark hours in which the Discrowned
tasted of the bitterness of death, with both the Past
was shrouded, and the Future veiled.
Paris, fair and stately, lay glittering in the sunset,
with its myriad of lights a-lit, its song, its revels, its
music; and Marion Marchioness of Vavasour and
Vaux drove through the streets, her moqueur smile
upon her lips, her silken lashes lazily drooped as she
mused over a thousand victorious memories, her deli-
cate form wrapped in costliest silks and laces, the
very crowds doing homage to her as she passed through
them, and they turned into the streets to glance after
the loveliest woman of her day.
The carriage with its fretting roans, its mazarine-
blue liveries, its outriders a la Eeine, for she passed
through Paris with well-nigh as much pomp and
circumstance as Montespan or Marie Antoinette,
halted before the doors of her hotel, and the people
thronging on their way to the Boulevards and the
Caf^s-chantants, turned to gaze at the superb equipage,
and more at the loveliness which lay back upon its
cushions, negligently indifferent to their gaze.
Among the crowd was a woman, a gipsy, at whom
224 STEATHMOEE.
a Quartier Latin student, who lived on a pipe and
three litre a day, and dreamt of high art when he
was not drunk with absinthe, looked, thinking rue-
fully what a model she would have made had he had
a sou to give her ; for as the double light of the
sunset and the rSverheres fell on her, her vagrant
dress was Kembrandtesque, and her olive features had
the dark, still, melancholy beauty of an Arab's that
mournful and immutable calm which Greek sculptors
gave to the face of Destiny and of the god Demeter,
and which on the living countenance ever bespeaks
repressed but concentred passions. And this wo-
man, mingling among the passengers that thronged
the trottoir, drew nearer and nearer the carriage as
it stopped before the Hotel Vavasour.
The horses pawed the ground impatient, the out-
riders pulled theirs up with noise and fracas, the
Chasseur lowered the steps, and Lady Vavasour de-
scended from her carriage, sweeping onwards with
her royal, negligent grace, the subtle perfume of her
dress wafted out upon the evening air. The Bohemian
had drawn near ; so near, that as she stretched for-
ward this vagrant obstructed the path of the English
peeress, and her heavy, weather-stained cloak, covered
with the dust of the streets, all but touched the scented
gossamer laces and trailing train of the Leader of
Fashion !
^ " Chassez-la /" said Marion Vavasour to her Chas-
seur, as she slightly di'ew back; she, for whom
FKUIT OF THE FUTUEE. 225
sovereigns laid down their state, and before whose
word bowed princes of the blood, to have her passage
blocked by a beggar-woman !
The Chasseur, obedient, struck the gipsy a sharp
blow with his long white wand, and ordered her out
of the way.
She fell out of the path, and Lady Vavasour went
onward up the steps of her hotel, and passed at once
to her own rooms to make, still more elaborately than
usual, her dinner toilette S. A. R. le Prince d'Etoile
and his Eminence the Cardinal Miraflora dined with
her that night, and ere bringing down royal stags she
loved to know that all her w^eapons were primed and
burnished. As she sank into her couch, and resigned
herself into the hands of her maids, she tossed care-
lessly over the hundred notes that had collected in her
absence, and were heaped together on a Louis-Quinze
salver, chased by Reveil ; she glanced at this, threw
that carelessly aside, till she had dismissed dozens,
scarce reading a line; at last over one she paused,
with amused triumph glancing away the languor from
her eyes, and a smile playing on her lips a smile of
success ; while as she looked up from the letter to the
face reflected in the mirror before her, the thought
that floated through her mind was a fatal truth :
" My cold, proud Strathmore, w^ho dared to disdain
the power of woman ! you own it now, then, at
last!"
And underneath the windows of her stately hotel
the Bohemian still lingered, as though loth to leave
VOL. I. Q
226 STEATHMOEE.
the place, while the crowds brushed past her, and the
carriage and the outriders swept away. When the blow
of the Chasseur had struck her, and he had ordered her
out of his path like a cur, the fixed, immutable me-
lancholy of her face had not changed : she had spoken
no word, made no sign, only her teeth had set tightly,
and the light as of a flame had leaped for one moment
into her eyes ; this had been all. She lingered some
moments longer, while the rush of the throngs jostled
and moved her unnoticed: then she passed slowly
away, walking wearily and painfully, with her head
bowed, as the daylight faded, and the gas in the lamps
glared brighter ; while amidst the gay babble and the
busy noise of Paris, her lips muttered to herself in the
mellow Czeschen patois of her people :
" My beloved ! my beloved ! Eedempta has not
forgot thee, Redempta will yet avenge thee! Her
hireling struck me, at her bidding, like a dog that
was not needed too. Patience! the lowliest stone
may serve to bring to earth the loftiest bird that -
227
CHAPTER XV.
THE CHAKM OF THE ROSE.
" She is divine but slie will destroy him !"
They were uncomplimentary words, and very harsh
ones, for that devout adorer of the beau sexe ; but as
Erroll stood leaning against the doorway of the por-
trait-gallery at White Ladies, and looking down it to
its farthest end, where Lady Vavasour was seated,
while Strathmore bent towards her, on the morning
after her arrival, a jealousy towards this woman
stirred in a heart which never harboured any acrid
thought or mijust envy to any living thing.
Is a man ever leniently disposed towards the woman
whom his friend loves? Very rarely. She is his
rival, and in lists, moreover, in which he can oppose
nothing to her power. She supplants him, she in-
vades his supremacy, fifty to one she is the cause of
dispute between them; and he will see no good in
q2
228 STEATHMOKE.
this soft-skinned intruder, this dangerous Nazarene :
unless he does what is worse fall in love with her
too!
And Erroll twisted his mofistaches, and muttered
to himself the first unflattering and mistrustful words
that he had ever uttered of a lovely woman, Bertie
being generally given to deny at all odds that the
Ceinture could ever strangle ; or the " Drink to me
with thine eyes!" ever be an invitation to a cup of
poisoned wine. Yet what he looked at was matchless?
and dazzled his eyes even while he swore against it.
" Hate her!" the germ of hatred might lie in it,
but all of impatience and aversion, that had crossed
and checked the witchery she had for Strathmore
were swept away the moment that he touched her
hand and received her beneath his own roof. She
came the beauty of Paris, the Queen of Fashion
where before her Mary Stuart had languished a cap-
tive, and in ages yet farther the ascetic Dominicans
had dwelt, thrusting away from them, with the throes
of an unnatural stiniggle, the mere thought, the mere
memory, of her sex. She came to White Ladies with
the rest of a gay, dashing, fashionable party from his
favourite Paris set ; and the advent of Royalty could
not have been received there with more splendour
than was the Sovereign of the Salons. The State
chambers were given to her, where the White Queen
and the Winter Queen had closed their soft Stuart
eyes in slumber before her, and where none save
crowned heads till now had been laid.
THE CHARM OF THE EOSE. 229
The witchery of this woman was on him, and to
lend eclat and honour to her I believe Strathmore
would have dissolved pearls in his wines, or scattered
diamonds a pleines mains. He did not realise it ; told
it, he would not perhaps have believed even yet ; but
the web woven by the golden shuttle was drawing its
charmed toils tighter and tighter about him, and he
was fast becoming the slave of Marion Vavasour :
doubt had but bound him closer, absence had but
riveted her chains ; and Lady Vavasour laughed
softly to herself when on the night of her arrival she
drew her hands through her amber tresses, as she
leant her head on her arm and looked at her face in
the mirror, thinking, " My cold Strathmore ! you are
my captive now!"
Was it love that she felt for him which set her
heart so strongly on this triumph ? It is as easy to
follow the wayward flight of a bird on the wing, or
an April wind's wanton vagaries as it blows over field
and flower, as to sift the reasons of a woman's will
of a coquette's caprices !
" That is your best friend. Major Erroll, isn't it ? "
she asked Strathmore, when they stood together in
the deep embrasured window of the picture-gallery
her eyes glancing at the Sabreur, where he leaned
against the doorway.
" My best indeed ! You have been introduced to
him?"
" Oh yes, you introduced me last night. I was
anxious to see the only person out of the whole world
230 STEATHMOEE.
to whom you are not indifferent ! What charm has
he about him ? "
" What charm ? Dear old fellow ! None, save the
gentlest nature and truest honour that I ever found
in any man. He has the strength of a lion and the
sweetness of a woman ; he is game to the backbone,
and frank as a boy !"
She raised her eyebrows. She was a little impa-
tient of the warmth of his tone and the sincerity of
his praise ; a tyrannous, victorious woman is jealous
of all influence not her own ; and perhaps she foresaw
here a power that might be opposed to hers. Lady
Vavasour, with a woman's swift, unerring instinct,
guessed that Erroll would be against her, in exact
proportion to the sway she exercised over his friend.
" You admiring warmth of heart and the candour
of boyhood, Strathmore," she said, maliciously enough.
" Why don't you cultivate them, mon ami, if you
think them so admirable?" ^
At her tone all the strange, sudden hatred of her,
which now and then flashed so ominously across the
passion which was growing on him for this woman,
stirred into life afresh for a moment; he smiled
slightly, the smile which made his face sneeringly
cold, and gave his eyes the look that, in a dog or a
horse, we call dangerous.
^' I am an Athenian, Lady Vavasour : I may ad-
mire what I fail to practise. Life makes us all
egotists and dissemblers; but we may honour the
nature which is such true steel that it resists and
THE CHAEM OF THE KOSE. 231
escapes the coiToding. Erroll's is the only one /
know which has done so."
Her impatience at Erroll increased. With the
quick wit of her sex, she saw at once that Erroll
would undermine her power if she did not undermine
hisj and she changed her tactics accordingly. She
looked at the Sabreur, letting her lashes droop over
her eyes, and lend them that glance of softened in-
terest which was the most delicate flattery such eyes
could bestow.
" I can believe it ; his face tells one so. How sin-
gularly beautiful a face it is, too; a woman might
envy him his golden hair and his azure eyes !"
And for the first time in his life, as he stood beside
her not for the praise of his personal attractions,
such petty vanity and envy Strathmore was far above
^but for the softness of her look as it dwelt on
him, the softness which with imperious jealousy he
loathed to see wake for any save himself, an ill-feeling
stirred in him towards the man whom he loved closer
than a brother. And Lady Yavasour glanced at
him and smiled, amused and content ; she had sown
the larvae of the cankerworm that would eat away
friendship ! It is a work at which the hands of
women ever love well to be busy.
She had done enough to please her, and with one
of her graceful, antelope-like movements she turned
and looked upward at the portrait above her.
" Ah ! a Vandyke and a Strathmore. Keally you
are wonderfully like one of those old pictures animated
232 STEATHMORE.
into life, Lord Cecil! My lord is quite right; he
says you are a walking Velasquez. There are the
eyes, ^fathomless and darkly-wise,' of the legend;
you have them and the portrait has them; and in
both they never soften, even to a woman !"
As she spoke, her own glanced at him with their
most enchanting mischief, and Strathmore, subdued
to the charm of her will, bent towards her :
" Looking down on youy the very portraits of the
dead might soften their glance. How then shall any
living man have power to resist? Have you not
heard that the Strathmores of White Ladies have
often disdained all, only as their doom, to madly and
vainly covet one ?"
And it was as he whispered those words that ErroU,
not catching even the sound of his voice, but seeing
the meaning warmth upon his face, the gaze which
Strathmore fastened on her, muttered, sotto voce,
" She is divine ; but she will destroy him !"
Into him, too, entered with a nature as different
to Strathmore's as the summer to the winter, as the
sunny unruffled lake to the deep and silent sea the
subtle poison of Marion Vavasour's beauty, mingled
with a warning and prophetic hatred of her power.
There was a large party gathered by this time at
the Abbey, and the hospitalities she had recently
quitted of a Bourbon at Neuilly had scarcely been
more brilliant than those which welcomed her at
White Ladies. There was Blanche de Ruelle, that
THE CHAEM OF THE ROSE. 233
haughty clark-eyed beauty, who, amidst all the homage
she received, treasured bitterly and wearily the me-
mory of the love once whispered by a man whom no
love had touched who was now her friend and her
host. There was Beatrix Beaudesert, that dashing
brunette who led the first flight in a twenty minutes'
burst up wind, and never funked at any bullfinch
or double that yawned in good Northamptonshire;
but could have cleared Brixworth Brook, and won the
Grand Military, were the sex allowed to enter either
for the Steeple Chase or the Service. There was the
Comtesse de Chantal, who wove half the intrigues of
the Tuileries, while statesmen and diplomatists wound
her floss silks, and who brewed emhroglie for the
Western Powers in her dainty Sevres coffee-cup.
There was pretty Lady Alaric, who was so very reli-
gious, and went on her knees before her missal-like
prayer-book before she floated down to breakfast to
commence the flirtations, which always pulled up just
short of a court and a co-respondent; of an error
and an esclandre. There was Lady Clarence Came-
lot, leader of the most exclusive of the thorough-bred
sets, who was cold and still as a rock-crystal, and
proud as any angel that ever fell by that queenly sin ;
but whose nature was sweet as the sun of Sorrento,
and whose heart was as mellow as a Catherine
pear, for the few who had the fortunate sesame to
either. There were these and others at White
Ladies, but Lady Vavasour outshone them all : she
234 STEATHMORE.
was the Relne Regnante, and she used her sceptre
omnipotently, and far eclipsed those whom most
women found it a hard matter even to equal.
The Marquis ^who came thither, en route to Spa,
for a few days, chiefly because the venison and the
char out of White Ladies' woods and waters had had
such a celebrity for centuries that he was curious to
test their reputed superiority was blessed with the
most gentlemanlike indifference to his lovely wife's
vagaries. He knew she was always flirting with
somebody wlio, didn't matter much ; perhaps when
he did think about it, his chief feeling was a certain
malicious pleasure in seeing so many of his fellow-
creatures chained, and worried, and fooled, by the
seductive tormentress whom he had let loose on the
world, with her droit de conquete legitimatised by his
coronet. The Marquis was a philosopher, and the
very husband for his wife : their marital relations
were admirably ordered for the preservation of peace
and friendship; they saw little or nothing of one
another (the secret recipe for conjugal unity), and,
by mutual consent, never interfered, he with her
caprices de cceur, nor she with his " separate establish-
ments." Wlien he had first married, people had
said his lordship was madly eiitete with his bride;
but that inconvenient folly had departed with a few
months' wear : and now ^he was proud of her loveli-
ness, but wisely and placably negligent on whom
that loveliness might shine; a wisdom and a placa-
THE CHAEM OF THE EOSE. 235
bility never more needed, perhaps, tlian now at White
Ladies.
" Lookest thou at the stars ?
If I were Heaven, with all the eyes of Heaven,
Would I look down on thee !"
The words were very softly whispered, as Strath-
more stood that evening on the terrace. It was Lite ;
the stars were shining, and the murmur of the waters
flowing onward under the ehn -woods was heard
plaintively and monotonously sweet, as Marion Va-
vasour, whose whim was every hour changing, and
who laughed at all feeling one hour, only to assume
it most beguilingly the next, left the drawing-rooms,
where she reigned supreme ; and strolled out for a
brief while in the summer night, followed by her
host. The white light of the stars fell about her,
glancing on the sapphires and diamonds that glittered
in her hair or sparkled in her bosom, and shone in
the depths of her eyes, as she raised them, and looked
upwards at the skies above, where, here and there,
some cloud of transparent mist trailed across the
brilliance of the moon, or veiled the swift course of
a falling star. She laughed, toying with the closed
autumn roses that twined round the balustrade.
" Strathmore ! you would do no such thing ! If
you had the eyes of Heaven, they would all be bent
in watching conferences you cannot join, and in
reading despatches you cannot see ! There are three
things no woman rivals with a man who loves any
36 8TEATHM0RE.
one of them ; they are a Horse, a State secret, and
a Cigar. We may edipse all three, perhaps, for
a little while, but, in the long run, any one of the
triad outrivals us."
He bent lower towards her, with a soft whisper :
" Do not slander my sex, and belie the power of
your own. Have there not been women for whom
men have thought the world itself well lost ? "
" There have been fools, mon ami ; and that is how
you would phrase it if you were out of my presence
and in the smoking-room, and anybody advanced the
proposition ! " she laughed, with that moqueur incre-
dulity with which at Yernon9eaux she had so con-
stantly tantalised and provoked him.
"Fools? It would be rash to call them so.
Manuel was no fool, yet he found his Isles of Delight
sweeter than the din and clash of triumph, and the
fall of conquered citadels. Alcibiades was no fool,
yet he found to look into the eyes of Aspasia better
than the sceptre of the Alcmoeonidae and the wisdom
of the Schools ! "
Three months ago Strathmore would have sworn
never to utter such words, save in derision : but now,
as he stooped towards her in the stillness of the
night, it was not either in jest or flattery, that he
spoke them ; the roses had the perfume for him
with which they had wooed Manuel in the Isles of
Delight; the eyes had the power to which the soft
Greek had bowed and sunk. For with every year
the roses bloom, and with every' age men love !
b
THE CHAEM OF THE ROSE. 237
Her sweet mocking laugh rang in the air the
laugh which had enthralled him under the lindens of
Bohemia, and from behind the mask of the White
Domino.
" What ! you who acknowledge but one love
Power; and covet but one boon Age; confess so
much as that ! You must be very suddenly changed
since three months ago; your eyes, a Strathmore's
fathomless eyes, actually soften at the mere memory
of Aspasia ! "
Her eyes laughed up into his, her hand touched
his own where it wandered among the roses; the
sultry air of the night swept round them, only stirred
by the dreamy splash of fountains, and the rise and
fall of her low breathings. He had no strength
against her in such a moment, nor did he seek, or
strive, or wish, to have.
" Changed ? If I be so, the sorcery lies at your
door. It is not the memory of Aspasia which evokes
the confession ; the daughter of Hellas has be-
queathed her glamour to one who uses it to the
full, as fatally, and as surely ! "
A smile trembled on her lovely lips, which became
half a sigh, while her hand absently toyed with the
sapphire cross that glittered just below her throat.
" Ah-bah ! " she said, with a laugh, whose gay
mockery had in it for the first time a timbre of
constraint, as of lightness assumed but unfelt. "I
do not believe in such sudden converts; I do not
receive them into my creed ! Strathmore, am I,
238 STEATHMOKE.
who read you so well wliile you were yet unknown,
likely to believe in your suave words so quickly?
Remember ! I am clairvoyante. ~ I know the sincerity
of every one who approaches me, and I know the
worth of your words, my diplomatist ! I shall be a
very long time before I accord to you the honour of
any belief in them."
"If you be clairvoyante, you will no longer dis-
believe; you will see without words what your sor-
cery works. You must know your own power too
well to doubt it ! "
Know her own power ? In every iota ! and she
knew it now ; knew that this man, who was steeled
in his own strength, and held himself far above the
soft foolery of passion, was fast bending to her will,
fast drinking in the draught which she tendered to
his lips, fast succumbing to her feet, to lie there,
bound, and powerless, to free himself from bondage ;
letting his life drift on as she should choose to guide
it ; losing all, forsaking all, risking all, so long as he
could look upward in her eyes, so long as her white
hand would wander to his own ! Know her own
power! Truly she did, and used it without mercy,
without scruple !
Her eyes looked up and dwelt on his with the
mournful languor which gave to their dark brilliance
the softness as of unshed tears ; the mockery of her
smile faded ; and the lips seemed charged with some
unuttered whisper, as the roses she toyed, were charged
with the heavy sweetness of the clinging dew. If
THE CHAEM OF THE EOSE. 239
ever woman loved, Stratlimore could have sworn she
loved him then; and the scorching sweetness, the
dangerous delight of a forbidden passion, stole over
him, and swept round him, in the sultry air of the
night, only heightened by the strange hatred of the
power which enthralled him to her will, which ever
mins;led with the madness that was stealing on him.
He bent towards her, his breath fanned her hair, his
hand touched hers where it rested among the flowers,
and touched the diamond circlet that chilled him as
with the chill of ice. It recalled to him that this
woman was but fooling him; that this woman was
Marion Vavasour ! And as their hands met, she drew
her own away ; while a faint sigh stirred her heart
beneath its costly lace.
" Hush ! If they be not the words of flattery, they
must not be the words of friendship ! How beautiful
the night is ! I do not wonder that poets love it
better than the day. The sunlight is for haste and
care, and for men's toil and labour, and for the fret
of daily life; but the night, when the flowers are
closed, and the cities are silent, and the stars look into
the chambers, where the living sleep peacefully as the
dead, and shine upon the rivers, till the suicides who
have sought their refuge wear a calm smile on their
cold lips the Night is the noon of the poets ^the
Night is for rest, for dreams, for "
" Love I "
The word which paused upon her lips he uttered
for her ; and the soft rebuke, the gesture with which
240 STBATHMORE.
she repelled him, and recalled to him that there was a
boundary which the language of homage must not
pass, to the woman who was a wife, enthralled him
more than any art she could have called forward, since
in his ear it whispered :
" The woman who fears your homage, fears her-
self!"
As she spoke dreamily, mournfully, with that oc-
casional earnestness which, when it succeeded her
caprices and her brilliant mockery, had the charm of
the Italian evening that follows on the dazzling day
Strathmore uttered, with a meaning new upon his
lips, the word which had been his derision and disdain ;
the word before which she paused ; the word which all
the voices of the voluptuous night seemed to re-echo
around them, while the moonlight streamed on the un-
covered limbs of sculptured marble that wore all the
repose of sleep, and the stars gleamed upon the
winding waters, white with the snowy burden of in-
numerable lilies. Love! Strathmore would have
flung away that word in disdain if spoken to him in
the *coldness of reason, in the pauses of judgment ;
but the insidious passion to which he gave no name,
but which in her presence swept over him like a
scorch of a sirocco, was love ; love, if you will, in its
most soulless, love in its most sensual, form, but that
form the most alluring, the most dangerous, in which
it ever steals into the life of man.
She shrugged her snow-white shoulders and pouted
her lips with a moue of pretty contempt, while at the
THE CHARM OF THE ROSE. 241
same time the faint sigh which was so little in unison
with her beauty, yet gave it so rare a charm, heaved
the sapphires where they sparkled in her breast.
" Bah ! that is the ' pastime of fools,' too, and no
more suits our world than the other. We do not be-
lieve in it ; we only mimic it. It may do for Undine
among the water-lilies yonder, but we have no faith
left for those childish idyls. They are contes pour rire
for us ; we have outgrown them ! Who loves in our
world?"
For all its mockery the question was one of pitiless
danger, spoken by her, as she leaned against the
balustrade in the moonlight, gazing down on to the
dark masses of foliage sheltering beneath ; while her
eyes were heavy as with some indefinite regret, as she
pressed against her lips the leaves of a rose she had
disentangled from the rest, which was wet and fra-
grant with the night dews. His lips brushed her
hair, his breath fanned her brow, his words were
whispered softly and wooingly :
" To answer you would be to risk rebuke afresh.
The truth would neither lie in words of flattery nor
of friendship."
" Then those words must not be spoken !"
The reply was but like the cold breath which fans
the embers into fire ; uttered while her eyes dwelt on
his without rebuke, wliile her lips parted with a breath
that was so near a sigh, while half in sadness, half in
coquetry, she silenced him with a light, fragrant blow
of the roses, the words in their very f orbiddance gave
VOL. I. R
242 STEATHMOEE.
fresh fuel to the dawning madness they rebuked. In
that moment he would have staked his Kfe that he
was loved by the woman he coveted, as he of Israel
coveted the loveliness on which the eastern sunlight
fell, making it in his sight, while yet it was unwon,
more precious than palace treasure, or kingly sway,
than the good word of man, or than the smile of his
God!
She turned from him with one of the swift move-
ments which had the charm of the antelope's grace,
turned as a woman might from the danger which she
dreads and fears ; the jewels in her hair glancing in
the starlight, the rose that had been pressed against
her lips, falling on the marble.
" Let us go in ! we have given time enough to the
night we must give the rest to the world."
'^ And while the world claims you, even friendship
may at least claim this ? " said Strathmore, as he
stooped, and lifted from the ground the rich fresh
rose which had rested against lips as fair and fragrant
as itself. She laughed her gay mocking laugh ; but
her eyes were saddened still as she glanced at him
while he held back the heavy draperies of a window
for her to re-enter the drawing-rooms.
" Ah, I know you too well : to-night the roses are
taken in flattery ; to-morrow, withered and faded, they
will be flung away with a mot ! You are a man of
the world, Strathmore, and all you prize is power.
There is no State secret in the core of that rose."
THE CHAEM OF THE KOSE. 243
" But there is a secret more fatal in the charm of
the lips that have touched it."
Strathmore's ejes darkened as he spoke with the
imperious and reckless passion she had rightly judged
would be the only love to which he would ever waken,
and which she had vowed to arouse in this man who
held himself sheathed in an armour of proof; his
words, losing the softness of suave compliment, w^ere
hoarse with a deeper meaning, and as he followed
her he thrust the rose into his breast the delicate
leaves that had gained value in his sight, because her
lips had touched them !
That night he drank deep of the delirious draught
of a woman's witchery; that night, as he paid liis
gold to the Marquis, at ecarte, he loathed the man
who had bought her beauty w^ith his title, and claimed
her by right of ownership, as he claimed his racing
stud, his chef de cuisuie, his comet wines ! he
loathed himself for having him at his table and
beneath his roof; for chatting the idle nothings
of familiar intercourse with him; and bidding the
friendly good night of host to guest, to the man
whom he hated with the dark hatred of the Strath-
more blood, which was ever stronger than their
wisdom, and deeper than their love, and closer than
their honour. True ! We seat our foes at our
board, and w^elcome what we hate to om- hospitality,
and eat salt with those who betray us, and those
whom we betray; wronged Octavia smiles as she
receives Cleopatra into her house, and Launcelot
e2
244 STRATHMORE.
shakes hands in good-fellowship with Arthur, the
day after he has writ the stain on his friend's
knightly shield ! It is done every day, and he was
accustomed to such convenience and such condona-
tion ; but Strathmore, when once roused, was a man
of darker, swifter, deeper passions than the passions
of our day, and the leaven of his race was working
in him, beneath the cold and egotistic sui'face of
habit and of breeding. As stillness fell that night
upon his household, and sleep came with the hush of
the advancing hours, and he stood in the silence of
his own chamber, hating the husband, coveting the
wife, knowing that both were now beneath his roof ;
he thought of her where, like the Lady Christabel,
Her lovely limbs she did undress,
And lay down in her loveliness :
till, with an oath, he pressed the broken rose-leaves
to his lips with a fierce kiss where her own had
rested on them, and hurled them out away into the
darkness of the night.
Already did he love this woman ?
245
CHAPTER XVI.
" AT HER TEET HE BOWED AND FELL."
" I CONGRATULATE you Oil your fresh honours,
old fellow. ' Bomont writes word the ministers have
selected you for the Confidential mission to .
Ticklish business, and a very high compliment," said
Camelot, one morning at breakfast, when Lord
Vavasour had left for Spa, and his wife had been
some weeks the reigning Queen at the Abbey.
Strathmore went on stirring his chocolate.
" Bomont has no earthly business to tittle-tattle
Foreign-office secrets ; however, since he's let it out,
I may confess to it."
" You accept, of course ? You must leave at once
eh ? "
"The affair's been on the tapis some time. I
always knew I should be selected to succeed Caradoc.
Try that potted char. Lady Beaudesert," answered
Strathmore, avoiding direct answer to either of
246 STEATHMOEE.
Camelot's inquiries, while among his letters lay one
which selected him, in a juncture of critical difficulty,
to occupy a post which older diplomatists bitterly
envied him, and which gratified his ambition and
signalised his abilities to the fullest. Questions and
congratulations flooded in on him from the people
about his breakfast-table, among whom Lady Vava-
sour was not ; she usually had her coffee in her own
chamber.
" You will draw us into a war, I dare say. Strath-
more," laughed Beatrix Beaudesert. " You dips love
an embroglio as dearly as journalists love a ' crisis ; '
and your race are born statesmen. Your herceaunettes
must have been trimmed with Red Tape ; and you
must have learnt your alphabet out of Machiavelli's
Maxims ! You're not like Hamlet ; you specially
enjoy the times being ' out of joint,' that you may
show your surgical skill in setting them right."
"Of course," laughed Strathmore. "If half a
million slaughtered gets a General the Garter, what
does he care who rots, so long as he rises ? Man's
the only animal that preys upon his species, and for
his superiority calls himself head of all creation.
The brutes only fly at their foes; ive turn on our
friends if we get anything by it I "
" Fi done! " cried Madame de Ruelle. " You have
just received the Bath, and are appointed to a post
which all the diplomatic world will envy you. You
otight not to be in a cynical mood, Strathmore. It
247
is those with whom life goes badly, who write satires
and turn epigrams ; a successful man always approves
the world, because the world has approved him I "
" True, madame ;" but at the same time there may
be a drop of amari aliquid under his tongue, because
the world has approved other people too ! "
" Dear old fellow, how glad I am ! " said ErroU,
meeting him in the doorway a quarter of an hour
afterwards. " My K.C.B. ! a discerning nation does
for once put the right man in the right place. On
my word. Strath, I am proud of you ! "
"Thank you!"
The two monosyllables were odiously cold after the
cordial warmth of the other's words, and Strathmore
crossed the hall without adding others. He was
conscious that he could fling away power, place,
fame, honour, if one woman's voice would murmur,
" Relinquish them for me ! " And the conscious-
ness made him bitter to all the world, even to the
man who was closer than a brother.
" The deuce ! How changed he is ! It is all that
woman's doings, with her angel's face and her devil's
mischief ; her gazelle's eyes and her Marcia's soul ! "
muttered Erroll.
" Vous avez Fair tant soit 2:eu contrarie, monsieur I "
said a voice behind him, half amused, half contemp-
tuous, as Lady Vavasour, having just descended the
staircase, swept past him, radiant in the morning sun-
248 STEATHMOKE.
light ; her silk folds trailing on the inlaid floor, and
the fragrance of her hair scenting the air. Perhaps
she had heard his words ?
Lady Yavasour, however, could very admirably
defy him and his enmity, and anybody or everybody
else. She played utterly unscrupulously, but equally
matchlessly, with Strathmore ; now avoiding him, till
she made his cheek grow white and his eyes dark as
night with anger; now listening with a feigned
rebuke, which made it but the sweeter, to the
whispers of a love, that while she chid, she knew
how to madden with the mere sweep of her dress
across him.
She was a coquette and a voluptuary. She loved
with the shallow, tenacious, fleeting love, such as
Parabere and Pompadour knew, while romance still
mingled with licence, as their best pointe a la sauce.
Strathmore's nature was new to her. To first rouse,
and then play with it, was delightful to this beau-
tiful panther ; and she did both, till a very insanity
was awakened in him. Love is by a hundred times
too tame and meaningless a word for what had now
broken up from his coldness as volcanic flames break
up from ice. It was a passion born entirely from the
senses, if you will, without any nobler element, any
better spring ; but for that very reason it was headlong
as flame, and no more to be arrested than the lightning
that seethes through men's veins and scorches all
before it.
She heard of his appointment to conduct the mis-
" HE BOWED AND FELL." 249
sion to as though he were her brother, in whose
career she was fraternally interested, and nothing
more ; and spoke of his coming departure to Northern
Europe as if it were a question of going into the next
county for a steeplechase or a coursing meeting.
" Ah ! you are going to 1 " she said, tranquilly,
when she met him in the library, trifling with a new
French novelette. " It will be very cold ! Give my
compliments to M. le Prince de Vorn ; he is a great
friend of mine, though he is a political foe of yours.
His wit is charming ! "
Strathmore, standing near her, felt his face pale
with passion to the very lips as she spoke. She had
wooed, while she repressed; she had tempted, while
she forbade his love, as a woman only does who knows
that she has conquered where conquest is dear to her ;
and now she heard of his departure for a lengthened
and indefinite term as carelessly as though he told her
he was going to visit his stables or his kennels !
He tried vainly that day to meet her alone; she
avoided or evaded him from luncheon to dinner with
tantalising dexterity. Letters to write, a game of
billiards, chit-chat in the drawing-rooms one thing
or another occupied her so ingeniously, that not even
for a single second did she give him the chance of a
tete-a-tete. She knew he sought one, and pleasured
herself by baflling and denying him, while her insou-
ciant indifference tortured him to fury. Ambition
had been the god, power the lust which alone had
possessed him ; with both within his grasp, he would
250 STEATHMOEE.
now have thrown both from him, as idly as a child
casts pebbles to the sea, only to feel the lips of Marion
Vavasour close upon his own !
That night there was a ball given at White Ladies,
one among the many entertainments which had
marked her visit ; it was to be, according to her com-
mand, a hal costume, and as Strathmore went to dress
he caught sight of the azure gleam of her silken skirt
sweeping along the corridor to the State chambers.
He crossed the passage that divided them, and in an
instant was at her side; she started slightly, and
glanced up at him :
" Ah ! Lord Cecil, you try one's nerves ! really,
you are so like those Vandykes in the gallery, that
one may very pardonably take you for a ghost !"
Strathmore laid his hand on her arm to detain her,
looking down into her eyes by the light from above :
" I have sought a word alone with you all the day
through, and sought it vainly ; mil you grant it me
now?"
" Now ? Impossible ! I am going to dress. The
toilette is to us what ambition is to you, the first, and
last, and only love a ruling passion strong in death !
A statesman dying, asks, 'Is the treaty signed?' a
woman dying asks, ' Am I hien coiffte ? ' "
Laughing, she moved onward to leave him, but
Strathmore moved too, keeping his hold on her hand :
" Hear me you must ! I told you once that I did
not dare to whisper the sole guerdon that would con-
tent me as the reward you offered; oioio I dare, be-
251
cause, spoken or unspoken, you must know that the
world holds but one thought, one memory, one idol
for me ; you must know that I love you /"
The words were uttered which, old as the hills
eternal, have been on every human lip, and cursed
more lives than they have ever blessed. And Marion
Vavasour listened, as the light gleamed upon the
lovely youth which lit her face, and her eyes met his
with the glance that women only give when they love.
"Hush, you forget," she murmured (and chiding
from those lips was sweet as the soft wrath of the
south wind !) " / must not hear you."
But the eyes forgave him, while the voice rebuked :
and Strathmore's love, loosed from all bondage, poured
itself out in words of eager honeyed eloquence, with
every richest oratory, with every ardent subtilty, that
art could teach and passion frame. To win this
woman, he would have perilled, had he owned them,
twenty lives and twenty souls, and thought the prize
well bought !
She listened still, her hand resigned to his, a warm
flush on her cheeks, and her heart beating quicker
in its gossamer nest of priceless lace; stirred with
triumph, perhaps stirred with love. Then she drew
from him with a sudden movement, and laughed in
his face with radiant, malicious mockery :
" Ah ! my lord, you have learned, then, how dan-
gerous it was to boast to a woman that you had but
one idol-f Ambition ; that you desired Age, and des-
pised Love ! The temptation to punish you was
252 STEATHMORE.
irresistible; you have learned an altered creed
now!"
The silvery laughter mocking him rang lightly out
upon the silence, and, ere he could arrest her, she had
entered her chamber, and the door had closed. He
stood alone in the empty corridor, stunned ; and a
fierce oath broke from his throat. Had this woman
fooled him ? The echo of her words, the ringing of
her laughter, stung him to madness ; the taunt, the
mirth, the jest flung at him in the moment when he
had laid bare his weakness, and could have taken his
oath that he was loved, was like seething oil flung
upon flame. He swore that night to wrench confes-
sion from her of her love, or or He grew dizzy
with the phantoms of his own thoughts. But one
resolve was fixed in him ; to win this woman, or to
work on her the worst revenge that a foiled passion
and a fooled love ever wrought.
As he passed out of the State corridor and turned
towards his own chamber he came unhappily upon
ErroU.
" Is it you. Strath ? I want a word with you ;
may I come in for ten minutes ? "
" Entrezr
Strathmore's voice sounded strange in his own ears ;
he would have given away a year of his life to have
been left alone at that moment.
Erroll followed him into his chamber, however,
noticing nothing unusual, for Strathmojfe, with
Italian passion, had more than English self-control ;
253
and Bertie, who had had bad intelligence of a weedy-
looking ba,y on whom he had risked a good deal for
the approaching Cesarewitch, came as usual to detail
his fears and doubts, and speculate on the most
judicious hedging with Strathmore. With a mad
love running riot in him, and a fierce resolve seething
up into settled shape, Strathmore had to sit and listen
to Newmarket troubles, and balance the pros and cons
of Turf questions as leisurely and as interestedly as
of old ! Apparently, he was calm enough ; actually,
eveiy five minutes of restraint lashed his pent-up
passion into fury.
The Newmarket business done with, ErroU still
lingered ; he had something else to say, and scarcely
knew how to phrase it.
"Will all these people stay much longer?" he
began ; " they've been here a long time."
" I don't tell my guests to go away," said Strath-
more, with a smile. "Besides, the pheasants just
now are at their prime."
" The pheasants ! Oh yes, but I was thinking of
the women. To be sure, though, you must leave
yourself in a few days ; I forgot ! When must you
start for 1"
" It is uncertain." The subject annoyed him, and
he answered shortly.
Erroll was silent a moment ; then he looked up, his
eyes shining with their frank and kindly light :
" Strath, you wouldn't take wrongly anything /
said, wi&uld you ? "
254 STEATHMOKE.
" My dear Erroll ! what an odd question. I believe
I am not usually tenacious?"
" Of course not ; still I fancy you'd let me say to
you what you mightn't stand from another man; I
hope so at least, old fellow ! We have never been on
ceremony with one another yet; and I want to ask
you, Cis, if you know how yours and Lady Vavasour's
names are coupled together ? "
He could not have chosen a more fatal hour for his
question !
"Who couples them?"
The words were brief and quietly said enough, but
Strathmore's hand clenched where it lay on the table,
and an evil light gleamed in his eyes.
" Oh, nobody in especial, but more or less every-
body," answered Erroll, carelessly, whom the gesture
did not put on his guard. " Your attention to her,
you know, must be noticed ; impossible to help it !
Naturally the men joke about it when you're out of
hearing ; fellows always will."
"What do they say?"
The words were quiet still, but Strathmore's teeth
were set like a mastiff's.
" You can guess well enough ; you know how we
always laugh over that sort of thing. Look here,.
Strathmore!" and Erroll, breaking out of the lazy
softness of his usual tone, leant forward eagerly and
earnestly, " I know you'll take my words as they're
meant ; and if you wouldn't, it would be a wretched
friendship that shirked the truth when its telling were
" HE BOWED AND FELL." 255
needed. If you called me out for it to-morrowj I
would let you know what everybody is saying that
you are infatuated by a woman who is only playing
with you I"
Strathmore leaned back in his chair, fastening his
wristband stud, with a cold sneer on his face ; it cost
him much to repress the passion that would have
betrayed him.
" The world is very good to trouble itself about me; if
you will name the particular members of it who do the
gossiping, I will thank them in a different fashion."
" The better way would be to give them no grounds
for it!"
" Grounds ? I don't apprehend you."
"You do and you must I" broke in Erroll, impa-
tiently; this smootli, icy coating did not impose on
him. " Whether your heart be in the matter or not,
you act as though it were. You are becoming the
very slave of that arch coquette, who never loved
anything in her live save her o^vn beauty ; you, who
ridiculed everything hke woman-worship, are posi-
tively infatuated with Marion Vavasour ! Stop ! hear
me out ! I have no business with what you do ; true
enough ! I am breaking into a subject no man has
any right to touch on to another ^I know that ! But
I like you well enough to risk your worst anger ; and
I speak plainly because you . and I have no need to
weigh our words to each other. Good God! you
must have too much pride, Strathmore, to be fooled
for the vanity of a woman !"
256 STRATHMOEE.
He stopped in his impetuous flood of words, and
looked at his listener, who had heard him tranquilly
a dangerous tranquillity, thin ice over lava-flames !
Strathmore only kept reins on the storm because it
rose to his lips ^to betray him.
" Pardon me, Erroll," he said, slowly and pointedly,
" I will not take you?' words as they might naturally
be taken, since you claim the privilege of ^ old friend-
ship;' but I must remind you that friendship may
be both officious and impertinent. The office of a
moral censor sits on you very ill ; attention to a
married woman is not so extraordinarily uncommon
in our set that it need alarm your virtue "
" Virtue be hanged ! " broke in Erroll, impetuously.
" You don't understand, or you ivon^t understand me.
All I say is, that hundreds of fellows will tell you
that Marion Vavasour is the most consummate
coquette going ; and that as soon as she has di'awn a
man on into losing his head for her, she turns round
and laughs him to scorn. What do you suppose
Scrope Waverley and all that lot will say? Only
that you have been first trapped and then tricked, as
they were !"
" Thank you, I have no fear I Lady Vavasour
makes you singularly bitter ? "
" Perhaps she does ; because I see her work.
Near that woman you are no more what you were
than "
"Really I must beg you to excuse my hearing a
homily upon myself !" interrupted Strathmore, as he
"he BOWED AND FELL." 257
rose, speaking coldly, intolerantly, and haughtily.
" As regards Lady Vavasour, she is my guest, and as
such I do not hear her spoken of in this manner.
As regards the gossip you are pleased to retail,
people must chatter as they like, if they chatter
in my hearing I can resent it, without having my
path pointed out to me ; and for the future I will
trouble you to remember that even the privileges of
friendship may be stretched too far if you overtax
them."
While he spoke he rang the bell for Diaz, and as
the Albanian entered the chamber from the bath-
room, Erroll turned and went out without more words.
He was angered that his remonstrance had had no
more avail; he was hurt that his interference had
been so ill received, and his motive so little compre-
hended. Like most counsellors, he felt that what he
had done had been ill-advised and ill-timed : while
Strathmore, indifferent to how he might have wounded
a friendship which he had often sworn worth all the
love of women, was stung to madness by the words
with which Erroll had unwittingly heaped fuel on to
flame. Men saw his passion for Marion Vavasour !
He swore that they should hopelessly and longingly
envy its success.
The fancy ball at White Ladies was as brilHant as
it could be made ; the great circle at the Dulve of
Tremayne's, the people sta}dng at Lady Millicent
Clinton's, and at other houses of note in the county,
afforded guests at once numerous and exclusive, and
VOL. I. S
258 STEATHMOEE.
tlie Royal women who had been visitors at White
Ladies had never been better entertained than was
Marion Vavasour. As he received them in the great
reception-room known as the King's Hall, that night,
women of the world, not easily impressible, glancing
at him, were arrested by they knew not what, and
remembered long afterwards how he had looked
that evening. He wore the dress of the Knights
Templars, the white mantle flung over a suit of
black Milan armour worked with gold, and the cos-
tume suited him singularly; while it yet seemed to
bring out more strongly still the resemblance in him
to all that was dark and dangerous in the Strathmore
portraits. Plis face was slightly flushed, like a man
after a carouse ; his wit was courtly and light, but
very bitter ; his attentions to the women were far
more impressive than his ever were he might have
been in love with all in his rooms ! ^but his eyes,
dark with suppressed eagerness, and with a heavy
shade beneath them, glanced impatiently over the
crowd. Every one had arrived, but she had not yet
descended ; his salons were filled, but to him they
were empty ! This was no light, languid love, seek-
ing a liaison as a mere pastime, which had entered
into Strathmore for another man's wife ; it was the
delirium, the frenzy, the blindness, in which the
world holds but one woman !
At last, with her glittering hair given to the winds,
a diadem of diamonds crowning her brow,'snow-white
" HE BOWED AND FELL." 259
clouds of drapery floating around her, llglit as morn-
ing mist, and lier beautiful feet sliod witli golden
sandals, she came, when all the rooms were full,
living impersonation of the Summer-Noon she re-
presented. A crowd of costumes followed her steps,
and murmurs of irrepressible admiration accompanied
her wherever she moved ; there were many beautiful
women there that night at AYhite Ladies, but none
that equalled, none that touched her. The gelden
apple was cast without a dissent into the white bosom
of Marion Vavasour; and at sight of her his reason
reeled and fell, and his madness mastered him, as it
subdued him of Broceliande before the witching eyes
and under the wreathing arms of Vivien,
while the forest echoed Fool !
His face wore the reckless resolve which was
amongst the dark traits of the Strathmores when
their ruthless will had fixed a goal, and under-
neath their calm and courtly seeming, the fierce
spirit was a-flame Avliich made them pitiless as death
in all ])ursuit. His eyes followed the gleaming trail
of her streaming hair, the flash of her diamond
diadem, with a look which she caught, and fanned
to fire with one ch'eamy glance of languor, one touch
of her floating drapeiy. And yet, even while the
passion devoured him, he hated her for its pain
liated her because she was another's and not his!
Do you know nothing of this because it has not
s2
260 STEATHMOEE.
touched you ? tut ! the forms of human love are
as varied and as controlless as the forms of hnman
life; and you have learned but little of the world,
and the men that make it, if you have not learned
that Love, often and again, treads and trenches close
on Hate.
It was as though she set her will to make her
beauty more than mortal, and goad him on till he
was as utterly her bond-slave, as the Viking whom,
as the Norse legend tells, twenty strong men could
not capture, yet who lay, helpless and bound as in
gyves of iron, by one frail, single thread of a woman's
golden hair. That night his passion mastered him,
and all that was most dangerous, in a nature where
fire slept under ice, woke into life, and set into one
imperiovis resolve.
It was some hours after midnight, when he passed
with her into a cabinet de i^einture. The wax-radi-
ance streamed upon her where she stood like some
dazzling thing of light, some dream of the Greek
poets, some sorceress of the East, some diamond-
crowned Priestess of the Sun. In the stillness of
the night they were alone, and her eyes met his own
with a glance which wooed him on to his sweet
temptation. Ambition seemed idle as the winds;
fame he was ready to cast aside like dross ; at the
most brilliant point in his career, he was willing to
throw away all the past, and cut away all the future,
so that her voice but whispered him " Stay ! " His
" HE BOWED AND FELL." 261
honour to the man who had been a guest beneath his
roof, the bond which bound him to hold sacred the
woman whom his house harboured, were forgotten
and left far behind him, drowned in his delirium as
men's wisdom is drowned in Avine. He saw, remem-
bered, heeded nothing in earth or heaven save her.
And she knew the meaninoj of his silence as he stood
beside her.
" So you will leave England very soon. Strath-
more?"
The words were light and ordinary : but her word
is but a tithe of a woman's language; and it was
her eyes which spoke, which challenged him to sum-
mon strength to leave her ; which dared him to rank
ambition before her, and claimed and usurped the
dominion which power alone had filled ! It was the
eyes he answered, only seeing in the midnight glare
the fairness of her face.
" Bid me stay for you ; and I resign the Mission
to-morrow ! "
^^ What ! desert your career, abandon your ambi-
tion, give up your power, and at a ivomaiUs word, too !
Fie, fie. Lord Cecil!"
The sweet laughter echoed in his ear, and her face
had all its witching mockery as she turned it to him
in the light.
" Hush ! My God ! you know my madness ; you
shall play with it no longer. Bid me stay, and I give
up everything for you ! But you must love me as I
262 STEATHMOEE.
love ; you must clioose to-niglit for yourself and me.
If you are fooling me, beware ; it will be at a heavy
price ! Love me ; and I throw away for you, honour,
fame, life, what you will ! "
The words were spoken in her ear, fierce with the
passion which was reckless of all cost; broken with
the love which was only conscious of itself, and of
the beauty that it adored. His face was white as
death ; his eyes gazed into hers, hot, dark, lurid as
the eyes of a tiger. This mad idolatry, this imperi-
ous strength, made love new to her, dear to her, as its
costliest toy to a child ; a richer gage of her power, a
stronger proof of her dominion. A blush warm and
lovely, if it were but a lie, wavered in her face ; her
eyes answered his with dreamy languor ; the diamonds
in her breast trembled with the heavings of her heart,
and even while she hushed him, and turned from him,
her hand lino-ered within his
He knew that he was loved ! and his whole life
would have been staked on that mad hour. His
arms closed round her in an embrace she could not
break from ; he wound his hands in the shining
shower of her amber hair ; he crushed this soft and
dazzling thing which mocked, and maddened him,
against the chill steel of his armour as though to
slay her. Burning words broke from him, delirious,
imperious, half menace, half idolatry, born of the
strong passion, and the sensuous softness, of which
his love at once was made.
" HE BOWED AND FELL." 263
" I sacrifice what you choose, for you ; or I hate
you more bitterly than man ever hated ! Frieiidsldp
between us I My God ! it must be one of two things
deadhest hate, or sweetest love ! "
He paused abruptly, crushing her with fierce un-
conscious strength against his breast, gazing down
into the face so fatally fair. Her eyes looked into
his with all their eloquence of loveliness ; her amber
hair floated, soft and silken, across his breast ; and
his lips met hers in kisses that only died to be re-
newed again, each longer, sweeter, more lingering
than the last.
264
CHAPTER XVII.
THE AXE LAID TO THE ROOT.
" You have written ! " she said, softly, looking up
into his eyes.
The whisper was brief, but as subtle and full of
power as any words that ever murmured from Cleo-
patra's lips, wooing him of Eome to leave his shield
for foes to mock at, and his sword to rust, and his
honour to drift away, a jeered and worthless thing,
while he lay lapped in a woman's love, with no
heaven save in a woman's eyes.
It was some hours past noon on the morrow of the
hal costume ; she had not yet left the State chambers.
Her hair was unbound, folds of azure, and lace of
gossamer textm-e, enveloped her ; and she lay back
on her low chair, resting her cheek on her white arm,
and letting her eyes dwell upon his.
" You have written ? " she murmured, softly, her
hand lying in his, her lips brushing his brow.
THE AXE LAID TO THE ROOT. 265
For all answer he put into lier hand a letter he had
just then penned a letter to decline the appointment
offered to him; to refuse the most brilliant dis-
tinction that could have fallen to him; in a word,
to resign the ambitions his life had been centred in,
to destroy the career, and the goal, of his present,
and his future !
Her head rested against his breast while she read it,
her eyes glancing over the few brief lines which gave
up all power and honour, the world and the world's
ambitions, and flung away life's best prizes at her
bidding, as though they were empty shells or withered
leaves. And a smile, proud and glad, came upon her
lips. Even she had scarcely counted on binding him
thus far to her feet; on chaining him thus utterly
her slave. She read it, then she lifted her eyes, now
sweet with the light of love, her warm breath fanning
his cheek.
" You will not regret it, Cecil ? Are you sure ? "
" Eegret ! My Heaven ! what room have I to
dream even of regret noiv ? My whole future would
be a willing price paid down for one hour of my
joy!"
The last words were spoken in a madman's heed-
less, headlong love ! He stooped over her, spending
breathless kisses on her lips, and passing his hands
through the golden scented hair which floated on her
shoulders. Every single shining thread might have
been a sorcery-twisted withe that bound him power-
less, so utterly he bowed before her power, so utterly
266 STEATHMORE.
he was blinded to all that lay beyond the delicious
languor, and the sensuous joys, which steeped his
present in their rich delight.
An hour afterwards, Strathmore descended from
the State chambers by a secret staircase which wound
downward to the library. He listened ; the room was
silent ; he looked through the apertm^e left in the
carvings, by those subtle builders of the olden days,
for such reconnoissance by those who need secresy ;
it was empty, and, pressing the panel back, he
entered. As it chanced, however, in the deep em-
brasure of a window, hidden by the hea"\^ curtains,
ErroU sat reading the papers ; and, as he looked up,
he saw Strathmore, before the panel had wholly
closed on its invisible hinges, that were screened
in a mass of carving. Erroll knew whence that
concealed passage led.
" Why was she not dead in all her demon's beauty
before ever she came here ? " he muttered to himself ;
for Erroll had grown jealous of Marion Vavasour ;
and had, moreover, strange stray notions of honour
here and there, better fitting the days of Galahad
than our own.
" You here, Bertie ! " said Strathmore, carelessly,
very admirably concealing the annoyance he felt,
as Erroll looked up from his retreat. " What's the
news?"
" Nothing ! " yawned the Sabreur, stretching him
the Times. " They notice your appointment for
THE AXE LAID TO THE EOOT. 267
; very approvingly, too, for the Thunderer.
When do you go, old fellow ? "
" I do not go at all," Strathmore answered briefly.
He was aware it must be known sooner or later, and,
in the reckless rapture of his present, ridicule, remark,
or censure, were alike disregarded.
ErroU looked quickly up at him :
"Not go V
" No. I have requested permission to decline the
appointment."
There was a dead pause of unbroken silence ; then,
with a sudden impetuous movement, Erroll rose,
pushing back his chair, and flinging his fair hair
out of his eyes with a gesture of impatient anger :
" Good God ! Strathmore, have you sneered at
every love all your life through only to become a
w^oman's slave at last ! "
The swift dark wrath of his race glanced into
Strathmore's eyes. At all times he brooked com-
ment or interference ill; now he knew himself the
slave of a woman, and while in the sweet insanity of
successful love his serfdom was delicious, and its
bondage dearer than any liberty that had ever been
his boast, the words were still bitter to him. To any
but his friend they w^ould have been as bitterly
resented.
"That cm-sed coquette!" muttered Erroll between
his teeth, as he paced impatiently up and down.
" Wliat ! she enslaves you till you wreck your whole
future at her word, let all the world see you in your
268 STEATHMOEE.
madness, and forget your honour even under your
OAvn roof ! "
The words broke out ahnost unconsciously ; he was
rife with hatred for the woman who had robbed liim
of his friend, and grown more powerful with Strath-
more than honour or ambition; than the present,
or the future ; than the ridicule of the world, or the
triumphs of his career.
Evil passions passed over his listener's face, flaming
into life all the more darkly because the accusation
bore with it the sting of Nathan's unto David the
sting of truth.
'- By Heaven ! no man on the face of the earth,
save you, should dare say that to me and live ! "
Erroll looked up, stopped, and halted before him,
his sunny blue eyes growing cordial and earnest as
a Avoman's :
"Dear old fellow, forgive me! I had no right,
perhaps, to use the words I did, but we have never
stopped to pick our speech for one another. No !
hear me, Strathmore. By Heaven ! you shall I Your
honour is dearer to me than it ever will be to anyone,
and I only ask you now to pause, and think how you
will endure for the world to know that you are so
utterly a coquette's bond-slave that you lie at her
beck and call, and give up all your best ambitions at
her bidding. I am sinner enough myself, God
knows, and have plenty to answer for ; but no pas-
sion should have so blinded me to honour, let her
have tempted as she would, that the mf e of an absent
\
THE AXE LAID TO THE EOOT. 269
guest sliould liave ceased to become sacred to me,
while trusted to my protection, and under my own
roof!"
He stopped : and a dead silence fell again between
tliem. They were fearless and chivalrous words,
built on the code of Gawaine and of Arthur; and
the spirit of the dead Knights, and of a bygone age,
broke up from the soft indolence and easy epicurean-
ism of the man, and found its way to just and daunt-
less speech ; but speech that on the ear which heard
it was useless as a trumpet-blast in the ear of a dead
man, as little heeded and as powerless to rouse !
The sting which lay in the Prophet's charge to him
of Israel lay here ; but here it touched to the quick
of no remorse : it only heated the furnace afresh, as
a blast of wind blows the fires to a white heat.
For one instant, while ErrolFs glance met his,
Strathmore made a forward gesture, like that of a
panther about to spring; then with all that was
coldest, most bitter, most evil in him awake, he leant
back in his chair, with a smile on his lips.
" An excellent homily ! Perhaps, like many other
preachers, you are envious of what you so veno-
mously upbraid !"
Over Erroll's face a flush of pain passed, as over a
woman's at a brutal and unmerited Avord.
"For shame! for shame!" he said, hotly. "You
know better than to believe your own words, Strath-
more ! I do not stand such vile inuendoes from
you!"
270 STEATIIMOEE.
Stratlimore raised his eyebrows, liis cliill and con-
temptuous sneer still upon his lips; his anger was
very bitter at all times when the velvet glove was
stripped off and the iron hand disclosed, which was a
feature of his race.
" Soit I it is very immaterial to me ! Pray put an
end to these heroic s]:)eeches. I have no taste for
scenes, and from any other man I should call an
account for them under a harsher name."
" Call for what account you will ! But does our
friendship go for so little that it is to be sw^ept away
in a second for a word about a woman who is as
worthless, if you saw her in her true light, as
aiiy "
"Silence!" said Stratlimore, passionately. "I
bear no interference with myself and no traducement
to her ! End the subject, once and for all, or ^"
" Or you will break with a friendship of twenty
years for a love that will not last twenty weeks!'
broke in Erroll, bitterly. It cut him to the quick to
be cast off thus for the mere sake of a capricious
coquette ; from their earliest Eton days they had had
no words between them till now that this woman
brought them in her train !
"It is the love which appears to excite your acri-
mony!" laughed Stratlimore, w4th his chilliest scorn;
that swift, keen jealousy stirring in him which is ever
the characteristic of such passion as his, even in its
earliest hours of acknowledgment and return, and
THE AXE LAID TO THE EOOT. 271
whicli pennits no man even to look wislifully after
its idol michastised.
As sharply as if a shot had struck him, Erroll
swung round, righteous indignation flushing his face,
and his azure eyes flashing fire.
"For God's sake, Strathmore, has your mad pas-
sion so warped your nature that you can set down
such vile motives in cold blood to my share ? I have
no other feeling than hatred for the woman who
befools you. Tliat I will grant you is strong enough,
for / see her as she is !"
" Most wise seer and admirable preacher ! Since
when have you turned sermonizer instead of sinner ? "
sneered Strathmore, coldly, the dark wrath of his
race gleaming in his eyes. " It sits on you very ill !"
" Sermonizer I am not, nor have I title to be ! "
broke in Erroll, his gentle temper goaded fairly into
anger ; " but still in your place of host I might have
paused before I violated the common laws of hospi-
tality and honour to the wife of an absent man, let
her have been my temptress as she would ! "
In another instant words would have been uttered
which would have cut down and cast away the friend-
ship of a lifetime ; but the door of the di'awing-room
opened.
" Are you tired of waiting. Major Erroll ? Never
mind ! Patience is a virtue, if, like most other virtues,
she be a little dull sometimes !" said Lady Beaudesert,
as she floated in a picture for Landseer with a
272 STRATHMOEE.
brace of handsome spaniels treading on the trailing
folds of her violet habit.
Her presence arrested, perforce, the words that
were rising hot and bitter to the lips of both. But
when the axe is laid at the root, what matter if its
work be delayed a few hours, a few days, a few
months ? The tree which would have stood through
storms is doomed by it, and will fall at the last !
The words Erroll had spoken that day had been
just and true ones : but, like most words of truth in
this world, they had been rash, and idle as the winds
to carry one whit of warning, to stay for one hour's
thought the headlong sweep of a great j)assion.
Now that she had, like himself, forgotten every bond
of honour, and cast aside every memory save the
indulgence of a forbidden love, the semi-hatred which
had so strangely mingled with Strathmore's fatal
intoxication had gone : and with it the last frail
cord which had held him back from falling utterly
beneath the sway of her power. If in the bitterness
of an unwelcome love he had been her slave, in the
delirium of a permitted one he was more hopelessly
so still. ErroU's charge of having violated the laws
of hospitality stung him for one instant to the quick ;
but the next it was forgottten, as her smile lighted
upon him, and her silvery laugh rang on his ear !
He weighed nothing in the scale against her ; he cast
away all to stay in the light of the eyes where his
heaven hung; he remembered nothing but the ex-
THE AXE LAID TO THE ROOT. 273
ultant joy 'vvliich lay in those brief, yet all-eloquent
words : " he loved, and was loved ! "
She held him in her fatal web, as Guenevere held
her Lover, when the breath of her lips sullied the
shield which no foe had ever tarnished, and her false
love coiled with subtle serpent-folds round Launcelot
till he fell. But in Marion Vavasour would never
arise, what pardoned and purified, the soul of the
Daughter of Leodegraunce : those waters of bitterness
which yet are holy Remorse and Shame.
i
VOL. I.
274
CHAPTER XVIII.
GUENEVERE AND ELAINE.
That niglit, when tlie men had left the smoking-
room, and all was still, Bertie ErroU quitted the Ahbey
by one of those secret entrances which had been known
to him, as to Strathmore from their childish days,
and took his way across the park, treading the thick
golden leaves nnder foot. A bitterness and depres-
sion were on him, very new to him, since he usually
shook off all care, as he shook the ash off his cigar.
After such words as had passed between them, he
would not have stayed an hour under any other man's
roof; but he loved Strathmore well enough not to
resent it thus, though the breach in their friendship
cut him more hardly than the sneers wdiich had been
cast at himself, as he paced on through the beech
woods, that were damp and chill in the silent night,
with white mists rising up from the waters in thin
wreaths of vapour.
GUENEVEEE AND ELAINE. 275
At some distance, just without the boundaries of
White Ladies, a light glimmered through the autumn
network of brown boughs and crimson leaves, from
the casement of a cottage which stood, so shut in by
wood from the lonely road near, that it might as
easily have been overlooked by any passer-by, as a
yellowhammer's nest on the highway. Its solitary
little beam shone bright, and star-like, through the
damp fogs of the chilly midnight; like the light
which burns before some Virgin shrine, and greets
us as we travel, wayworn and travel-stained and
foot-weary, down the rocky windings of some hill-
side abroad. The simile crossed Erroll's mind, and
perhaps smote something on his heart; it icas the
light of a holy shrine to him, but one from which his
steps too often turned, and one which now reproached
him.
He passed under the drooping hea\y boughs, and
over the fallen leaves, across the garden of the
little cottage, drew a latch-key from his pocket,
opened the door, and entered. A light was left
burning for him in the tiny cottage entrance, which
was still as death ; he took the lamp in his hand,
mounted the staircase noiselessly, and turned into the
bed-chamber upon his left. It was small, and simply
arranged, but about it, here and there, were articles
of refined luxuiy ; and half kneeling beside the bed,
as she had lately knelt in prayer, half resting against
it, in -the slumber which had conquered the watchful
wakefulness of love, was a young girl, delicate and fair
T 2
276 STEATHMOEE.
tis any of the white HHes that had bloomed one brief
hour, to perish the next, on the lake-hke waters of
White Ladies. Her head rested on her arm, her
lips were slightly parted, and murmuring fondly his
o^vn name, while
her face so fair,
Stirred -with her dream as rose-leaves with the air.
His step was too noiseless to awake her, and he
stood still gazing on her in that slumber in which
Life, becoming at once ethereal and powerless,
escaping from earth, yet lying at man's mercy, so
strangely and so touchingly counterfeits Death. And
while he looked, thoughts arose, filling him witli
vague reproach ; thoughts at which the women he
had just left, the women Vho knew him in intrigue,
and in pleasure, and in idle flirtations, would have
bitterly marvelled, and as bitterly sneered. The
world in which we live knows nothing of us in our
best hours, as it knows nothing of us in our worst !
They were in strange contrast ! the dazzling
beauty of Marion Vavasour, on which he had looked
a few hours before, with a sorceress-lustre glancing
from her eyes, and rare Byzantine jewels flashing on
her breast; with this fair and mournful loveliness,
which was before him now, hushed to rest in the
holiness of sleep, with a smile like a child's upon
the tender lij)s, and with a shadow from the lamp
above falling upon a brow so pure that it might have
been shadowed by an angel's wings. They were in
strange contrast ! and he stood beside his Wife, as
GUENEVEEE AND ELAINE. 277
Launcelot stood and gazed upon Elaine, while the
pure breath of a stainless love was still upon his soul,
and while the subtle power of Guenevere only stole
upon him in the fevered, vague, phantasma of a
fleeting dream, unknown and unadmitted even there.
He stooped over her, and his lips broke the spell
of her sleep with a caress. She awoke with a low,
glad cry, and sprang up to nestle in his breast, to
twine her arms about him, to murmur her welcome
in sweet, joyous words.
" Ah, my better angel," he whispered, fondly yet
bitterly, as he rested against his the cheek which still
blushed at his kiss, speaking rather to his own
thoughts than to her, "why are men so doomed by
their own madness, that they sicken and weary of a
pure and sacred love like yours, on which Heaven
itself might smile; and forsake it for a few short
hours of some guilty passion, that is as senseless as
the drunkard's delirium ! "
And she believed he only spoke but of the sweet-
ness of their o^vn love, pitying those who had never
known such, and smiled up into his eyes.
278
CHAPTER XIX.
THE SILVER SHIELD AND THE CHAEMED LANCE.
" Is he to monopolise her for ever ? He's kept the
field a cursed long time," said a Secretary of Lega-
tion, dropping his lorgnon, one night at the Opera in
Paris.
"The deuce he has!" said his Grace of Linden-
mere. " Madame is marvellously faithful ; and they
say he's as mad after her now as when he first "
" Taisez vous ! A scandal six months old is worse
than dining off a recliaufft,^ broke in the Yicomte
de Belesprit. " A naughty story is like a pretty
mistress; charming at the onset, but a great bore
when it's lost its novelty. All Paris chattered itself
hoarse over their liaison last December ; what we
want to know note is when will it come to an end ? "
" I dare say you do," chuckled the old Earl of
Beaume. "But the succession there would be as
dangerous as to the Polish Vice-royalty ; a smile from
her would cost a shot from him."
THE SILVER SHIELD. 279
"All! sort of man to do that style of thing,"
yawned the Duke. "Don't understand it myself,
never should. But he's positively her slave
actually."
" Plenty of 3^ou envy him his slavery ; white arms
are pleasant handcuffs," laughed Lord Beaume. " But
that woman's ruined him, and, what's worse, his
career. He gave up the special mission to
because it must have taken him where her ladyship
could not go! A man's never great in public life
till he's ceased to care for women ! "
" Which is possibly the cause, sir, why the country,
looking to you for great things, has always looked in
vain?" said Lindenmere.
The Earl laughed, taking out his tabatiere, ; he
was good nature itself, and his Grace was a privileged
wit, cest a dire, one of that class who have made
rudeness " the thing," and supply the esprit they lack
by the impudence they love ! The fashion has its
conveniences it is difficult to be brilliant, but it is
so easy to be brusque.
Those whom they discussed were Lady Vavasour
and Strathmore.
Their love had been the theme of many buzzing
scandals the autumn before, when, on leaving White
Ladies, she had returned to Paris accompanied by
him ; but the buzz had soon exhausted itself, and
the liaison had become a fact generally understood,
and but very little disguised. His place and right
had been long unchallenged, however bitterly envied ;
280 STKATHMORE.
and Avliatever rumour had said of lier capricious in-
constancy, as yet she had showed no disloyalty to her
lover, whatever she showed to her lord. Either she
really loved at last, or her entire dominion over the
man who had scoffed at the sway of women satiated
her delight in power ; for no coquetries ever roused
the jealousy, fierce as an Eastern's, which accom-
panied his passion, or flattered the hopes of those who
sought to supplant him. If any magician had had
the power twelve months before to show him himself
as he had now become, Strathmore would have recog-
nised the revelation, as little as we in youth should
recognise our own features could we see them marked
with the corruption they wall wear in death.
Men who have been long invulnerable to passion
ever become its abject bond-slaves when .they at
length bend down to it. Ambition was lulled to
forgetfulness in the sweet languor of his love ; had
he been offered the kingship of the earth he would
have renounced it, if to assume its empire he must
have left her side ! This man, who had long believed
that he could rule his will, and mould his life, as
though he w^ere, god-like, exempt from every inevita-
ble weakness or accident of mankind, had sunk into
a woman's arms, and let the golden meshes of her
loveliness enervate him, till every other feeling which
might have combated or rivalled her power was
drowned and swept away. Passion, often likened by
poets unto flame, does thus resemble it that, once
permitted dominion, it can no longer be kept in
THE SILVER SHIELD. 281
servitude, but, mastering all before it, devours even
that from wliicli it springs. The strength which he
had boasted could break " bonds of iron even as green
withes " had ebbed away into a voluptuary's weakness :
and under the even, brilliant, modern life he had led
through these eight months in Paris, there had rioted
in him the same guilty love which revelled in pos-
session of the Hittite's wife, the same keen jealousy
which slew Mariamne for a doubt in the days of old
Judaea !
Lady Yavasour sat that evenino; in her locje at the
Opera, Strathmore in attendance on her, as he had
been throughout the winter wherever she went, the
Due de Vosges and Prince Michael of Tchemeidoff
her visitors, for the entree to her box, closely as
it was besieged, was ever a privilege as exclusive as
the Garter. Scandals, badinage, dainty flattery,
choice wit lying in a single word, rumours which
answered the " Quid Novi ? " asked as perpetually in
Paris as in the Violet City, circulated in her box;
and she sat there in her dazzling youth, shrouded in
black perfumed lace, like a Spanish gaditana, with
the diamonds flashing here and there and gleaming
starlike among her lustrous hair. Her coquetry of
manner she could no more abandon than could a
fawn its play, than a sapphire its sparkle ; but, as I
say, she never had fairly aroused that deadly jealousy
which lay in wait within him, as a tiger lies ready to
spring ; though Strathmore, whose love was a sheer
idolatry, as enthralled by her now as in the first mo-
282 STEATHMOEE.
ment wlicii his kiss had touched her lips, begrudged
every ghmce wliich fell ou another.
" Strathmore has the monopoly now ; how long
will he keep it?" said the Due de Yosges, as he left
her boxj while S.A.R. the Prince d'Etoiles entered it.
^^ There are women Avho have no lovers perhaps (at
least for our mothers' credit we all say so), as there
are women who use no rouge; but when once they
begin to take to either, they add both fresh every
day!"
"Peste!" said Ai'thus de Bellus, pettishly, "he has
had it a OTeat deal too Ions;. He must have bewitched
her in his old English chateau ! If a whole winter is
not an eternal constancy, what is ?"
" And this is May !" pursued the Due, reflectively ;
" but those Englishmen are resolute fellows ; they
hold their ground doggedly in battle as in love ; there
is no shaking them in either "
" Vo^ai ! There is only shooting them in both ! If
one picked a quarrel with my Lord Cecil, par liazardj
and had him out ^"
" He would shoot you, mon cher, and stand all the
better with madame for it," said the Due, dryly.
" Strathmore is the crack shot of Europe ; he can hit
the ruby in a woman's ring riding full galop saw
him do it at Vienna ! "
" Look, Cecil ! There is your friend !" said Marion
Vavasour, lifting her lorgnon to her eyes and glancing
at the opposite side of the house.
"What an indefinite description!" laughed Strath-
THE SILVER SHIELD. 283
more, lifting liis slowly. " We all have a million of
friends as long as we are happily ignorant of what
they say of us I"
" Tais toi with your epigrams ! All social comfort
lies in self-deception, we know that," she laughed,
mth that glance beneath her silken lashes wdiich had
first fallen on him under the midsummer stars of
Prague, and which still did with him what it would.
" There is your friend, your brother, your idol the
Beau Sabrem', as you call him I hope he will not
be shot like his namesake, Murat ; he is far too hand-
some ! Look ! it is he yonder, talking with Lord
Beaume!"
" Bertie ! so it is. What has he come to Paris for,
I wonder ? "
Strathmore's eyes lightened with pleasui'e, and his
brightest smile passed over his face as he recognised
Erroll; his attachment to him was too thorough to
have been cut away by those words, even bitter
though they were, which had been exchanged be-
tween them in the cedar drawing-room at "^^Hiite
Ladies.
She, glancing upward at him, saw the smile, and
this woman, rapacious, exacting, merciless, with the
panther nature under her delicate loveliness, per-
mitted no thought to wander away from her, allowed
no single feeling to share dominion with her ! And
she prepared his chastisement.
"What is he in Paris for? To see me, I dare
say ! N^est ce pas assez? Go and tell him to come
284 STRATHMOKE. , ^
here; he will not venture without," she said, care-
lessly, while she leaned a little forward and bowed to
Erroll with an envoi from her fan, for wdiich many
men in the house that night woukl have paid down
ten years of their lives.
How well she knew her lover, and knew her powder
over him ! The smile died off Strathmore's face, the
dark, dangerous anger of his race glanced into his
eyes.
"Pardon me if I decline the errand. I am not
your laquais de place.j Lady Vavasour!" he said,
coldly, as he leaned over her chair. The answer
was too low for those who w^ere in the box to hear it-
She glanced at him amusedly and shrugged her
shoulders slightly :
" Many would think themselves flattered by being
even that ! Since you are refractory, there are others
more obedient. M. de Lorn, will you be so good as
to tell Major Erroll he may come and speak to us
here ? There he is with Lord Beaume."
Lorn left the box on his errand, and Lady Vava-
sour turned to D'Etoiles. She was the reigning
beauty of Paris still ; none dared to dispute with her
the palm of pre-eminence. Sovereign of fashion,
she bent sovereigns to her feet, created a mode
with a word, and saw kings suitors to her for a
smile. She must have surely, they thought, loved
Strathmore strangely Avell, with more than the
fleeting, capricious passions rumour accredited to
her, that she allow^ed him so jealous and undivided
THE SILVEE SHIELD. 285
II sway over her ; or perchance it was that " the
dove " still loved " to peck the estridge," to tame this
imperious Avill to more than woman's weakness, and
see this man, who boasted himself of bronze, grow
pale if her glance but wandered from himself !
" For shame ! " she murmured to him, as he bent
for an emerald which had fallen from her bouquet-
holder. "How rude you were. Do you not know
my motto is Napoleon's, Qui m'aime me suit ! "
" Yes," answered Strathmore, unsatisfied and un
appeased ; " but I do not see why you should care to
be followed by so very many ! "
She struck him a fragrant blow with her bouquet
of stephanotis.
"If a vast crowd follow ever in vain, is it not
the greater honour to be singled from so many?
Ingrat ! "
The idolatrous passion that was in him for Marion
Vavasour, which bound him to her will, and made
him hold his slavery sweeter than all duty, pride, or
glory, gleamed in his eyes as he stooped towards her
in the swell of a chorus of the "Puritani," which
drowned his words to any ear save hers :
" Ay ! but love grudges the idlest word that is cast
to others, the slightest glance that is bestowed else-
where. There is no miser at once so avaricious and
unreasonable ! "
"Unreasoning indeed! You are much more fit
for the days of Abelard and Heloise than you are for
these. No one loves so noio save ourselves ! "
286 STRATHMOEE.
For the sweetness of the last word, as it lingered
softly on her lips, murmured in the swell of the
music, he forgave her the arch mockery of the first ;
and the sirocco of jealousy which, once risen, never
wholly subsides, lulled, and passed harmless away for
the present.
Meanwhile, in Lord Beaume's loge^ Erroll received
his message; received it with so much reluctance,
almost repugnance in his tone and on his face, that
the Comte de Lorn, who had only known him a Sir
Calidore for courtesy and a very Richelieu for women,
stared at him and shrugged his shoulders.
" Peste ! the greatest beauty of the day sends for
you, and you are no more grateful to her than this !
And one must stand very well with her, too, to be
invited to her box."
''\ have no desire to ^ stand well' with Lady
Vavasour," said Erroll, impatiently, forgetting how
strangely his answer must sound, for memories of
this woman as he had last seen her at White Ladies
stirred u.p bitterly within him ; about her, and her
alone, passionate words had passed between him and
the man he loved ; through her, and her alone, that
blow had been struck to their fnendship, from which
friendship never rallies, howsoever dexterously the
w^ound be healed.
" So much the better for you, for nobody has a
chance of rivallino; vour friend, it seems. AUons !
you will hardly send her such a message back as that?"
THE SILVER SHIELD. 287
said the Frenchman, as he thought, " Ah-ah ! the fox
and the grapes ! "
Erroll wavered a moment, uncertain how best to
evade her summons : he felt an invisible reluctance,
in truth ; did it not seem too exaggerated and cowardly
a word, almost a dread to enter this woman's presence?
He recognised her sorceress power, and feared it ; he
knew her influence over Strathmore, and resented it ;
he believed it wisdom to shun, foolhardihood to brave
her ; he abhorred her nature, and he acknowledged
her loveHness. Down at White Ladies, even whilst
he had hated her for the dominion she exercised over
Strathmore, and loathed her for the wanton passions
she veiled beneath her delicate and poetic language,
her soft and refined 2;race, he had felt the dazzlina:
charm of that divine beauty sweep over and stagger
him, as though her eyes had some necromantic
spell.
Now, wdth all the stories that were rife of the utter
bondage in which she held Strathmore, abhorrence
is scarce too fierce a word for what Enroll felt for
Marion Vavasour. Had there been a plausible pre-
text for leaving the house to avoid her he would have
taken it ; akeady on his lips was an excuse to Lorn
for his attendance to her loge^ when, as she leaned
forward to lorgner the prima donna, her glance met
his, and he saw her, with the diamonds glancing in
her bosom and her hair, and her lustrous eyes out-
shining the jewels. He hated her, condemned her,
288 STEATHMOEE.
feared lier, approaclied lier with aversion ; but that
encliantment which Marion Vavasour exercised at
will over temperaments the most diverse, hearts the
most steeled to her, stole upon him as the syren's sea-
song stole upon the mariners of Greece, though they
turned their prow from the fatal music ; as the fumes
of wine steal perforce upon a man, though he refuse
to put wine even to his lips !
It seemed impossible to evade her summons; he
turned and followed the Comte de Lorn, as in this
life we ever follow the slender thread of Accident
which leads us to our fate.
"What has brought you to Paris? Anything
special ? " asked Strathmore, when Lady Vavasour,
having siven him a smile and a few words of neffli-
Sfent graceful courtesv, continued her conversation
with D'Etoiles.
The hot words that had been passed between them
had been allowed to drop into oblivion by both freely
forgiven by the one who had had right on his side ; not
so freely by the one who had been in error, for it was
one of the worst traits among many darker that
belonged to men of liis race and blood, that a Strath-
more never pardoned.
"My uncle's illness," answered Erroll. "He was
knocked over at Auteuil by paralysis; they tele-
graphed for me some days ago, but this is the first
time I have left him. It will prove a fatal, they tell
me, though perhaps a lingering, affair."
" My dear fellow, I must be ' extremely glad and
THE SILVEK SHIELD. 289
vastly sorry ' in one breath ^tlie first for your inlieri-
tance, the last for your uncle ! " smiled Strathmore.
"Poor Sir Arthur I wonder I never heard of it;
wiUjhe last long? "
" He may die any day ; he may linger on for many
months ; so the doctors say at least, but they always
hedge admirably in their prognostications, so that,
whether their patient be cured or killed they are
always in the right ! I fear there can be no chance
for him."
" Fear, Bertie ! on your honour, now ? " said
Strathmore.
All the old baronet's estates were willed by him to
Erroll (his title he naturally succeeded to) ; a pro-
perty not extensive, but of high value to a cavalry
man in debt and in difficulties.
" On my honour ! What will come to me will set me
free in very many ways; but to rejoice in a man's
death because you reap by it, would be semi-murder."
" My dear fellow," cried Strathmore, " we all break
the Decalogue in our thoughts every hour with im-
punity, and in our acts, too, if we're not detected :
Le scandak du monde est ce qui fait I'offence,
Et ce n'est pas p^cher que pecher eii silence !
Tartuffe's the essence of modern ethics !"
"Ethics! Murder! Death! Quelle horreur !
What are you talking about?" interrupted Lady
Vavasour, catching fragmentary sentences, and turn-
ing her head, with her eyebrows arched in surprised
inquiry, as the Royal Duke bowed his cong6 and left
VOL. I. u
290 STEATHMOEE.
her to go to the box of a scarcely more notorious,
though a less legltmiate lionne, who had not a coronet
to leaven her frailties. "What horrible words to
bring into my presence ! Are you going to quit-the
world and organise a new La Trappe, Major Erroll?"
"Not exactly! Though truly there are living
beauties that might drive us to as fatal a despair as
the dead loveliness of the Duchesse de Montbazon
awoke in the Trappist founder ! " answered Erroll,
almost involuntarily.
The eyes that dwelt on him, the subtle spell that
stole about him, seemed to wrench homage from him
to this woman in the very teeth of his aversion and
his condemnation of her, as if to justify the taunt
and the suspicion that Strathmore had thrown in his
teeth at White Ladies, and to make him by his own
words prove himself a liar !
Strathmore' s eyes flashed swiftly on him, and a
contemptuous smile came upon his face. The thought
that prompted it did ErroU as rank an injustice' as
evil judgment ever wrought in a world where its
wrong verdicts are as many as the sands of the sea,
and its restitutions so tardy that they are rarely
offered, save to the dead.
Marion Yavasour smiled her moqueur, radiant,
resistless smile.
" Well, it is a proof of woman's omnipotence that
love for her w^as even the cause and the corner-stone
of the most rigid monastic establishment that ever
abjured her ! Have you been long in Paris ?"
THE SILVEE SHIELD. 291
" Only a few days. I am staying in attendance
on an invalid relative at Auteuil."
" Auteuil! Ahj we go there in a week or so to
my maisonette. We shall be charmed to see you,
Major ErroU, whenever yon can make your escape
from yom' melancholy duty."
He bowed, and thanked her. For the few words
of invitation many peers of France and England
would have laid down half the trappings of their
rank! He acknowledged them, but chillily; he
could not pardon her for her work; he could not
forgive her the estrangement between him and the
man he held closer than a brother ; he could not see
Strathmore under the dominance, and by the side of
the woman who ensnared and enslaved him, without
bitterness of heart. He read her aright, this sorceress,
who could summon at will every phase of womanhood;
and his instinct and his reason alike allied to give out
against her an uncompromising verdict.
With but cold courtesy he made his adieux, and
left her box as soon as it was possible to do so, having
satisfied the bare obligations of politeness her message
had entailed on him. And yet, despite all this, as
Erroll drove away from the Opera towards the Maison
Doree that night, the remembrance, which involmi-
tarily uprose to him, of a pure and childlike loveliness,
dedicated solely to him, which he had often watched
when hushed in the repose of a sleep whose very
dreams were haunted by no other image, and mur-
mured of no other name than his own, was rivalled
I u2 .
292 STEATHMORE.
and thrust aside by what he strove to put away from
him the memory of the glance which had just met
his, hke the bHnding rays of a dazzhng hght. Strong
and close about him was the treasvire of a warm and
holy love ; but if even such a love be a silver shield
in hours of temptation to the man who wears it
(though rarely, I deem, is it so, as poets picture and
as women dream), it could not ward off the charmed
lance of Marion Vavasour's fascination. Her memory-
followed him through the gas-lit streets to the Maison
Doree ; her memory haunted him still when he left
the laughing companions of his opera-supper, and
drove through the grey dawn of the early June
morning back to Auteuil. Are we masters of our
own fate, or are we not rather playthings in the
hands of circumstances and chance, floated by them
against our will, as thistle-down upon the winds that
waft it ? It is an open question ! Half the world
mar their own lives, and the other half are marred
by life.
" Now, Cecil, what cause was there for you to look
as stern ' as Othello, and to assert that you were not
my laquais de place to-night, when I merely paid an
ordinary courtesy to your friend because he is your
friend? You are as jealous as a Spaniard, and as
ungrateful as a man always is for that matter, so
there is no need for a simile ! " said Lady Vavasour
that night, after her own opera-supper, when Etoiles,
the Due de Vosges, and others who had formed her
THE SILVER SHIELD. 293
guests at that most charming of all soupers a minuet,
had left.
The light shone down upon her where she leaned
back on a dormeuse, her perfumed laces drooping
off her snowy shoulders, and the diamonds glancing
above her fair Greek-like brow. They were alone';
the Marquis was as polite a host to Strathmore as the
Marquis du Chatelet to Voltaire ; and Strathmore
bent his head and kissed the fragrant lips that mocked
him with such sweet laughter.
"Ma belle! there is cold love where there is no
jealousy! Love waits for no reason in its acts; it
only knows that it hates those Avho rob it of the
simplest word, and is jealous of the very brute that
wins a touch or a smile !"
She laughed as his hand pushed away from her a
little priceless toy dog, gift of the Prince d'Etoiles,
which had nestled in her lace.
" I tell you you are fit for the old days of Venice,
when a too daring look was revenged with the dagger !
Nobody loves so now; we are too languid, and too
wise ; and two years ago you would have sworn never
to love so yourself, Cecil."
" Even so. But two years ago I had not met yoii^
" No. How strangely we met, too, those summer
evenings in Bohemia ! I told you it was Destiny."
He smiled.
"My loveliest! I do not think there is much
' destiny ' in this life beyond that which men's hands
294 STEATHMOEE.
fashion for themselves, and women's beauty works
for them. But if fate would always use me as it
did then, I would never ask other guidance."
She laughed, that soft low laugh, which in its most
mellow sweetness had always a ring of triumph and
of mockery difficult to define, yet ever menacing in
its music.
"It was destiny! Let me keep to my creed.
Bah ! Life is governed by chance, and each of us,
at best, is but a leaf that drifts on a hazardous wind,
now in the sunlight, and now in the shadow; and
the winds blow the leaves hap-hazard together, for
evil, for good, whichever it be."
And Lady Vavasour laughed again at her own
careless philosophies ; a true epicurean, life had its
most golden charm for her, and turned to her its
sunniest side ; her foot was on the neck of the world,
and the world lay obedient, and enraptured by its
enslaver ; Emperors obeyed a sign of her fan, how
should Fate ever dare to turn rebel against her ?
Then that sadness, which gave to her gazelle eyes
their most dangerous sweetness, came over them ; she
assumed by turns, and at will, every shape and
caprice, now heartless and moquayite as the world
she reigned over, now tender and full of thought,
as the women of whom poets dream in their youth.
" Ah, Cecil ! I have taught you a better love than
the Age and the Power you once coveted ? And yet
who knows ? perhaps Ambition was the safer and
the wiser, though not the more faithful, mistress."
I
THE SILVER SHIELD. 295
His eyes dwelt, with all the passion which she had
awakened in him, on the living picture before him, on
which the light of the chandeliers shone, enhancing
all its wonch'ous brilliance of tint, and its rare
grace of form. His idolatry outweighed the world,
shrivelled ambition as a scroll of paper shrivels in the
flames, and filled his past, his present, and his future,
only with Herself !
" I do not know I do not care ! " he said, passion-
ately, whilst his lips were hot against her cheek.
"For the love you have taught me, I would barter
life and sell eternity ! Ambition it is dead in me !
You are my world. I have forgot all others."
God pardon him I It was fatally true. And she
looked up softly in his eyes, his slavery was sweet
homage to her power, his insanity precious incense to
her vanity ; and as she knew that she was all the
world to him, so she whispered him he was to her.
She had vowed him so many times, with her enclian-
tress tongue, her fragrant lips, her eloquence of eye
and word so she vowed him now.
" Ah, Cecil ! " she murmured, with that caressing
sweetness which was as resistless as the song of the
serpent-charmer, " we do not love the less, but the
more, because the world sometimes robs us of each
other, and would sever us if it could by its laws ! "
296
CHAPTER XX.
BELLA DEMONIA CON ANGELICO EISO.
The Bosquet de Diane was situated midway
between Auteuil and Passy, in one of the most
charming retreats of those pleasant j)laces; nestled
among sycamore and lime-woods, catching from its
terraces a distant view of the spires of Paris, and a
nearer of the windings of the Seine, with a paradise
of roses beaming in its gardens, an($' the luxury of
a serail lavished on its interior. Hither, in the sultry
heats of early summer, when the thermometer was
38 deg. Reaumur, came Marion Lady Vavasour,
after a lengthened Paris season, with a choice cohue
of courtiers and guests, to head a circle scarce less
brilliant than that adjacent at St. Cloud ; to pass her
mornings, forming new sumptuary laws and despotic
edicts of fashion ; to frame fetes a la Watteau in her
rose-gardens, or in her private theatre ; to spend her
BELLA DEMONIA CON ANGELICO RISO. 297
time as became the Marchioness of Vavasour and
Vaux, and the Queen of Society.
As it chanced, joining the grounds of her maisonette,
lay the grounds of a cozy bachelor-villa, that had
been long inhabited by an old English bo7i viveicr,
who, with very good taste, preferred Auteuil, and all
to which Auteuil lies near, to his own baronial hall
down in the dulness of Shropshire, where there was
not a decent dinner-party to be had nearer than
twenty miles as the crow flew.
The bon viveur was Sir Arthur Erroll, and the
villa was, naturally, the Paris residence of his nephew,
who had been summoned when a fit of paralysis
threatened a sure, though a gradual, death for the
baronet. The windows of the villa looked on to the
glades of lindens and the aisles of roses, which
formed the choicest portion of the grounds of the
Bosquet de Diane ; and, sitting in Sir Arthur's sick
chamber, Erroll had full view of the Decamerone-
like groups which strolled there in the luminous
evenings, and had ever before him, as Lady Vava-
sour moved in the moonlight or the sunset radiance
through the arcades of her orangeries, or down the
length of her terraces, a living picture which united
the rich glory of Giorgone with the aerial grace of
Greuze. Perchance this constant, yet distant view
of her, was more dangerous than closer neighbour-
hood ; through it, perforce, she haunted his solitude,
and usurped his thoughts.
Of necessity detained at Auteuil, he could not shut
298 STEATHMOKE.
away what rose before liis sight ahuost as regularly
as the evemng stars themselves. He avoided visiting
at the maisonette as much as he could possibly do ;
to have constantly refused would have been to place
himself in the absurd light of censor morum to Strath-
more, and fostered rather than disabused the jealous
error into which Strathmore had fallen, regarding
the motive of his interference, the autumn before,
at White Ladies. Still he went thither very rarely ;
but he could not walk through the Bois, or drive
down the Versailles road, without encountering her
carriage or her riding parties ; and, when he sat
beside the open casements of his uncle's chamber,
he could not refuse his admiration to the brilliant
and graceful form surrounded with her court, which
came ever within his sight, when she swept slowly
along the marble terraces, or beneath the avenues of
her rose-gardens in the starlit summer night. He
ceased to wonder at Strathmore's infatuated passion
he ceased to marvel that, for this woman's loveli-
ness, he flung away fame, time, ambition, everything
that had before been precious to him, like dross ; and,
almost unconsciously and irresistibly, Erroll ceased
also to care to drive over to dine at the Cafe de
Paris, and sup in the Breda Quartier, as he had done
hitherto, but stayed, in preference, to sit beside the
w^indow of an old man's sick-room, with some opened
novel, on which his eyes never glanced.
Perhaps Lady Vavasour perceived how markedly
her own invitations were refused, yet how surely
BELLA DEMONIA CON ANGELICO KISO. 299
a lorgnon watched her from the balcony of Sir
Arthur's villa that was visible through the limes;
or perhaps she divined and resented the verdict her
lover's friend gave against her? "Major Erroll is
very rude. I have asked him to dinner three times,
and he has three times ' deeply regretted ' &c. &c.
Anglice, refused! I have shown him courtesy for
your sake, Cecil ; now show him resentment for mine.
I will not have you sworn friends with the man ; he
does not like me !" said her ladyship, laughingly, one
morning to a lover with whom her word was law, and
who thought, as two scenes at White Ladies arose to
his memory, " Perhaps he but likes you too well ! "
The few phrases sufficed to sow afresh the doubt
in Strathmore's mind, and increased the coolness that
had come betwixt him and Erroll, whom Marion
Vavasour treated with an absolute indifference, though
occasionally she watched him with something of that
curiosity which a flattered, spoiled, and beautiful
woman might well feel for the only one who had
ever dared to show her his disapprobation, and been
proof against her charm ; and occasionally her eyes
lighted and dwelt on the rare beauty of his face with
a look which meant it were hard to say what per-
haps a challenge.
" Major Erroll, pray why do you persistently shun
us?" she asked him, suddenly, forsaking the negli-
gence with which she had hitherto habitually treated
him, as was natural from a proud and courted beauty
to a man who had ventured to be ungrateful for her
300 STEATI-IMOEE.
condescensions, and to show tacit rebuke of her con-
duct, without the prestige of a high rank to excuse
him the insolence. It was one of those days when
he had been compelled to come to the Bosquet de
Diane, invited too publicly as he encountered them
in the Bois, when riding there with one of Louis
Philippe's equerries, to be able to refuse without
drawing comment. They were for the moment almost
alone, as they strolled through the gardens after din-
ner under the arcades of roses, while the starlight
shone down on her, burnishing her hair to its mar-
vellous lustre, and glancing off the Byzantine jewels
above her brow, while the shadow of the night, half
veiling her beauty, gave it a dream-like softness. She
knew so well when it was at its rarest and its most
resistless !
" Shun you ? " he repeated. " Lady Yavasour can
surely never do herself so little justice as to deem
such a rudeness to her possible ? " Courtesy demanded
the reply, and he gave it only coldly.
"I deem it possible because it is the fact," she
laughed carelessly. " Come, I never am refused or
kept waiting, why do you do it ? "
"It is much honour to me that you should even
remark a discourtesy if I have been guilty of it," he
answered, coldly still. He condemned and abhorred
the nature which he read aright in her, and yet his
voice softened despite himself as he looked down
upon her.
"You answer by an equivoque? For shame! I
BELLA DEMONIA CON ANGELICO RISO. oOl
never permit evasions. Say frankly, Major Erroli,
the truth that you dislike me !"
As she spoke she turned her ejes full on him, their
liquid darkness laughing with a light as of amusement
that any mortal could be found so mad as to defy her
power, so blind as to resist such loveliness ; a light
that flashed on him with its dazzling regard, chal-
lenging him to treasure hatred if he could, to pre-
serve defiance if he dared, to Marion Lady Vavasour.
" Come," she repeated, a haughty nonchalance in
her attitude as she turned her head towards him,
while she swept through the fragrant aisles of her
gardens, but with a mocking, amused smile about her
lips "come ! the truth now, you dislike me?"
" Say, rather. Lady Vavasour, that I dread your
power, and that since you ask for frankness I
perhaps condemn its too pitiless exercise, its most
pitiful results ! "
They were rash and daring words to the pampered
beauty, who heard the truth as rarely as a sovereign
in her palace ! They were spoken on the impulse of
a frank nature and a loyal friendship, as Erroll's
clear eyes turned on her steadily, with the first
reproof that any living being had ever dared to offer
to Marion Vavasour. From that moment his fate
was sealed with her.
The glance she first gave him was one of grand
amazement, of haughty indignation ; then this woman,
in whom was combined every fairest phase of woman's
witcheries, and who could assume at her will any
302 STKATHMOEE.
lying loveliness slie would, looked at him with a faint
blush wavering her cheek, and her lashes slightly
drooping over her eyes, that lost their malicious
laughter, and grew almost sad.
" Then you are unjust, and err in hasty judgment,
a common error of your sex," she said, gently, almost
mournfully. "Bah! you might as well condemn
the sun that shone on the -i^gean, because the blind
and the unwise bowed down to it as God ! You are
prejudiced. NHmporte ! when you know me better
you will not do me so much wrong."
And for the moment, as he listened, he forgot that
she who spoke was the arch-coquette of Europe, was
the avowed mistress of Strathmore ; he forgot that
those words on her lips were a graceful lie without
meaning, only uttered as the actress utters the words
of the role she assumes for the hour. They stood
alone in the starlight, about them' the heavy perf mne
of the roses that roofed the trellised aisle and strewed
the path : and as she leant slightly towards him in
the shadow, while her eyes seemed to glisten, and her
rich lips to part with a sigh, words broke from him
unawares, wrenched out against his will by this
woman's sorceress' charm.
"Let us know you as we may, you do with us
what you will ! Lady Vavasour, for God's sake take
heed ^liave mercy ^you hold a fearful power in your
hands !"
His tone bore more meaning than his speech?
which was rapid and broken, and his prayer, in its
BELLA DEMONIA CON ANGELICO EISO. 303
very warning, only bore fresh incense to her triumphs.
Her eyes dwelt softly on him, and the warm hue still
lingered temptingly, flatteringly, on the cheek that
had no charm so perfect as its blush. Then she
laughed gaily as she turned away, the Byzantine
gems gleaming in the star-rays. " Power ? Bah !
over an hour's rest, a moment's pique, an evening's
homage ! C^est grand* cJiose /"
With this careless, coquettish mockery she left
him, and was joined by Strathmore and the Due de
Vosges; and Erroll, turning suddenly away, strode
down the rose-walk in the moonlight at a swift,
uneven pace, not to return to the Bosquet de Diane
that night. Twelve months before, he had sworn, in
that certain remorse which comes to all men when
they return to one who has been faithful to them in
absence, with a reading of fidelity which they have
never followed, that no other love should ever sup-
plant or efface his Wife, sworn it in all sincerity,
believing that he should guard his oath sacred and
unbroken. She was very dear to him still, dear as
our purer thoughts, our better moments, our most
holy memories are dear to us ; he loved her fondly,
truly, deeply; yet, the holier love was but a frail
shield against the unholier, which swept on him
with a sirocco's strength, hated yet insidious. Mes
freres I did ever yet the silvery wings of your better
angel so wholly enshroud you, that they made you
blind to the laughing eyes of the bacchantes that
beset your path, and banned from your sight the
304 STEATHMOEE.
wreathing arms and wooing lips that lured you into
error ? Never, most surely, out of the happy fables
of women's credence, and of poet's song.
Power !
It was the idol of Marion Vavasour's religion, in
one form ; as in another, ere she had supplanted it,
it had been her lover's. She warped and used it
pitilessly ; and though she had disowned it, never
exercised it more capriciously and mercilessly than
over Strathmore, now that she had set her foot on
his bent neck, and bound him into slaver}^ No toy
was so dear to this tyrant as the imperious and un-
yielding nature she had bowed like a reed in her
hands ! No pastime so precious to her as to show, by
a hundred fresh ingenuities, how pliant as straw to
her bidding was the steel of his will and his pride !
" From whom is that letter, Strathmore ? " she
asked one evening in the rose-gardens, her favourite
haunt, where she sat with him, the Due de Vosges,
and an English Viscountess.
The letter just brought him was from a British
minister arrived in Paris for a European congress,
and he passed it to her; his will had sunk so abso-
lutely into hers, that he neither seemed conscious of
her dominion or his own degradation.
She arched her delicate brows as she read.
"This evening? You cannot wait on him this
evening. We play ' Hernani.' "
" I fear it is impossible for me to avoid going ; you
see what is said," he answered her. " The Earl
BELLA DEMONIA CON ANGELICO EISO. 305
would take no excuse in a matter of so much
import "
" He must take it, if I choose you to send him one.
You cannot go, Strathmore ; I need you specially."
" But indeed, since he does me the honour to
desire this interview, I could not refuse it without
marked slight, not alone to himself, but almost to the
Government at home."
Lady Vavasour made a moue mutine. She knew
a lovely woman is never lovelier than when she will
not hear reason.
" The Government ? What is that to me ? You
are to play Hernani, and that is of far more con-
sequence ! "
" But I assure you " began Strathmore, while
Lady Mostyn listened amusedly, and he caught a
smile on the face of the French Duke that he bitterly
resented : his rivals Strathmore kept utterly at a dis-
tance. She had him in thraldom, but they had not.
" Well ? what ? I cannot have my theatricals
disarranged to pleasure your Earl, especially as he
is a person I most particularly dislike. What would
be the consequence, pray, of your neglecting his
summons ? "
" I have said, it would be little less than an insult
to AUonby in his ministerial capacity', and "
" Insult him, then ! " cried her ladyship, with
charming nonchalance. " And apres ? "
Strathmore stooped towards her and lowered his
voice for her ear alone.
VOL. I. X
306 STEATHMOEE.
" Apres ? Yeiy natural offence from liim person-
ally, and great injury to my own future career, from
neglecting the opportunity lie affords me."
" Galimatias I I cannot have my tragedy spoiled
for the Ministry's farce," she answered aloud, with a
sliMit shruff of her shoulders. "You must send an
excuse to the Earl, or " and she dropped her voice
" if you insult me with divided allegiance, Cecil, I
shall receive none. You used to boast Age and
Power were all you coveted. You may go back to
your old loves if you disobey meJ'
Perhaps it was that she felt jealous of her old
rival, Ambition; perhaps it was merely to see her
own power in its wanton completeness ; but her eyes
dwelt on him with the glance that, from her to him,
commanded all things.
*' Well ! " she asked impatiently, " do you obey
Lord Allonby or me? Which? I never share a
sceptre."
A flush passed over Strathmore's face almost of
anger ; the look he caught on the face of Yosges
reminded him for once of how^ completely he a
courtier, a diplomatist, a man of the world, who had
sneered with his most bitter wit at love and all its
follies had become the slave of one passion, weak as
water in the hands of one woman !
"Well? Which?" asked Marion Vavasour, with
her charming petulance, and by the light in her
eyes he knew that his capricious imperious tyrant
would perchance resent disobedience in this trifle on
which her will was set, more than a far heavier
BELLA DEMONIA CON ANGELICO RISC. 307
disloyalty. And so great was his idolatry, that even
with lookers-on at his degradation, he who had held
his will as bronze, and had boasted his self-dominion
as omnipotent let her rule him even in this wanton
caprice.
He bowed his assent to her :
" What Lady Vavasour wishes is a command."
It was a strange oversight which, for a mere
frivolous tyranny, made Lady Vavasour detain him
that night at the Bosquet de Diane.
An hour afterwards, when the sun had sunk, and
the ladies had re-entered the inaisonette to dress for
dinner, Strathmore, at her request, remained behind
them, and took his way to the stables to look at her
favourite mare, which had been lamed in exercising
that morning, and which she would not leave solely
to the care of stud-grooms and farriers.
It was dusk, and the second dressing-bell had rung,
when, as he returned from the stables through the
thick shrubberies which filled that part of the grounds,
he stumbled against a female form, which crouched
upon the ground in a position so suspicious of some
thieving design, that he laid his hold upon her
clothes, and bade her get up Avitli no very gentle
epithet. The woman shook his grasp off by a rapid
movement, rose with a spring like a young doe, and
stood confrontmg him, without any sign of guilt or
fear, though her gipsy look, and dusty dress, con-
firmed him in his opinion that her errand lay towards
any costly trifles, or loose jewels, which the open
x2
308 STEATHMOEE.
windows and vacated rooms of the maisonette might
let her make away with undetected.
She did not seem to hear the words he spoke to
her; but her eyes dwelt on him curiously and ear-
nestly, while a smile, half melancholy, half bitter,
played about her lips ; and as he scanned her face in
the fading light, he recognised in its dark Murillo
beauty the Bohemian woman who had taken his gold,
and prophesied his future, under the Czeschen limes.
The prophecy and the prophetess would alike have
been long forgotten, but for the one who had heard
and seen them with him.
" What ! " said the Zingara, in the Czeschen patois,
her moui'nful and monotonous tones falling dreamily
on his ear " what ! the love is born already ? the
yellow hair has drawn you in its net so soon ? Take
care ! take care ! Your kiss is not the first, nor will
it be the last, on her lips "
"Peace to your jargon!" broke in Strathmore,
imperatively, catching enough of the words to incense
him. "What are you doing here, an idle vagrant
prowling about to steal?"
She threw herself back with a proud fierce gesture,
the blood staining her bronze cheek, and a sinister
light flashing in her eyes, that were darkly brilliant
as those midnight stars from which, in olden days,
her ancient race had prophesied to kings the fate of
empires ; by which now, in a strange travesty of their
old fame and faith, they babbled to peasant-girls
of love-predictions. "Steal!" she muttered in the
BELLA DEMONIA CON ANGELICO RISO. 309
Czeschen dialect. "Steal from her house! I
would not drink a stoup of water that was hers^ to
save myself from dying."
The words were so fiercely spoken, that Strath-
more, catching them imperfectly, thought he must
have mistaken a language which, though known to
him was unfamiliar, and laid his grasp upon her
afresh.
" You must give some very good account of your-
self, or I shall turn you over to the gendarmes. You
are in private grounds at nightfall, and are here on
no honest errand."
She turned her eyes on him half haughtily, half
mournfully, with the same gaze with which she had
studied his face under the Bohemian limes, and un-
consciously his hand relaxed its hold and left her
free. The regard, while it shamed the suspicion
which accused her of low theft, struck him with the
same chill as when her vague words had traced out
his future in Bohemia. An artist would have given
that look to the changeless and fathomless eyes of
the Eumenides.
"I have no need to thieve," said the Bohemian,
quietly and proudly, " and my errand I will not tell
you now. In a little time, when you hate where
you still love, you may share it not yet. The sin is
fair in your sight, and the kiss is sweet on your lips
to-night; when the shi bears its curse, and the kiss
has turned to gall, come to me ; Redempta Avill show
you your vengeance."
310 STEATHMOEE.
She turned swiftly, and had passed away in the
gloom through the trees before he could arrest her ;
taking advantage of the pause of involuntary hesi-
tance which he made, as he debated with himself
whether this woman was a maniac, or whether again
he might not have misunderstood the Czeschen dia-
lect, rendered doubly unfamiliar as it was by the
gipsy patois she employed.
His eyes vainly sought her in the twilight. She
was out of sight; and, disinclined to enter on the
chase himself, he passed into the house, and apprising
some of the servants that a beggar-woman was loiter-
ing suspiciously about the grounds, bade them have
diligent search made for her. His order was obeyed ;
but the Bohemian was nowhere discovered. She had
made her way through the twilight like a night-bird,
and left as little trace of her path.
311
CHAPTER XXI.
THE BROODING OF THE STORM.
"Hernani" was never better acted at tlie Fran-
9ais than it was in tlie Marcliioness's private theatre
tliat sultry midsummer night. So many people were
staying at the Bosquet de Diane that no other audience
was needed, and save one of the Royal Dukes from
St. Cloudj Erroll was the only externe guest. A little
note with but half a dozen lines in it had been sent
over to Sir Arthur's villa, signed " Marion Yavasour
and Yaux." That very morning Erroll had vowed
to leave Auteuil as soon as his uncle's death or re-
covery released him, and while forced to remain there
to go no more to the maisonette ; but I'homme pro-
pose, et femme dispose I The few lines of gracious
courtesy and airy raillery on his eremite tastes invited
him that evening, and broke asunder all his freshly-
forged resolves !
From her bijou theatre, of which Lady Yavasou r
312 STRATHMOKE.
was singularly fond, actors and audience met again
in the supper-room, decorated a la Louis Quinze,
where she loved to revive the petits soupers that came
in with the Eegency and went out with the Eevolu-
tion. These suppers were a peculiar charm of the
Bosquet de Diane, and to-night one of the most bril-
liant of them followed on " Hernani," at which the
sparkle of the wit might fairly have vied with the
mots of Claudine de Tencin, Piron, or Eivarol; at
which the Due de Vosges, regarding his hostess,
began to ponder that the advice of Arthus de Bellus
might after all be the best, and that it would be well
to shoot a lover whom there seemed no chance of
supplanting; and at which Erroll's mots were so
sparkling and his spirits so high, that some of the
men there wondered to themselves if he were bent
on eclipsing Strathmore.
The supper lasted long, every one loth to leave a
table at which he was so well amused, and with the
introduction of those perfumed cigarettes which
Lady Vavasour permitted to be smoked in her pre-
sence, and which scented the air with a delicate
Oriental odour, fresh jeux de mots seemed intro-
duced, and it was very late when the Bourbon Prince
took his departure. Son Altesse Koyal was always
cordially gracious and en hon camerade with Strath-
more, whom he detained now at the door of his
carriage, saying some last words relative to the S ar-
tery Stakes, for which their horses were respectively
entered ; and when he rolled away, Strathmore stood
THE BEOODING OF THE STORM. 313
outside the house a few moments, while Lord Vava-
sour left the entrance-hall after accompanying the
Due to his carriage. The air was pleasant, for the
night was very sultry and oppressive, as with the near
approach of a tempest ; it reminded him of the one,
now near twelve months past, when the first words of
love had passed his lips to Marion Vavasour, and he
had thrust into his breast the crimson leaves that had
been pressed against her lips ; it was she only of
whom he thought now as he paced up and down,
while the dawn broke above the woods to the east.
His passion had this characteristic of a worthier love
that its success had not weakened, but tenfold
strengthened it, and her memory alone filled his
thoughts now in the hot, hushed stillness. She
was his ! and he would have driven out of his path
the boldest that had dared to seek her love, he would
have revenged with death the fairest rivalry, that had
dared to usurp his place.
Some twenty minutes might have gone by when,
as he turned to re-enter the maisonette by one of the
French windows which stood open to the piazza, the
figure of a man came between him and the moonlight,
he did not see whether from the villa or the grounds,
though a moment after he recognised Erroll. They
met as the one left, and the other turned to enter,
the house, met for the first time alone since the day at
White Ladies, when words about a woman, rash on
the one side, bitter on the other, had laid the edge of
the- axe at the root of their friendship.
314 STBATHMOPtE.
In a clearer light, or when his own thoughts had
been less preoccnpied, Strathmore must have noticed
the change that had come over Erroll in the short
o
half-hour that had gone by from the time of the
Due's departure, when he had been laughing and
talking at the supper-table with all its usual gaiety,
and even more than his usual wit. Then, his mots
had sparkled through the conversation, dropped out
in his soft, lazy voice, and his laugh had rung as
often and as clearly as a young girl's now, his face
was haggard and lined, and as he pulled the Glen-
garry over his eyes his hand shook slightly, like the
hand of a man who has been drinking deeply, which
was scarcely the case with him, since he had never
left the society of titled women.
Strathmore, however, did not observe this ; it was
very dark just then, as the clouds swept over the
moon, and the lights from Lady Vavasour's villa,
which were streaming full in his own eyes, dazzled
them, while Erroll stood with his back to their blaze.
" I thought you had left us, Bertie. Have a
cigar ? " he began, holding out his own case.
"What a hot night, isn't it? There's a storm
brewing. We shall have it down in half an hour."
" It looks dark," said Erroll, briefly, as he struck a
fusee.
"Mild word! How sweetly those limes smell;
rather oppressive, though. I will walk across the
grounds with you to Sir Arthur's ; how is he to-
day ? "
THE BEOODING OF THE STOKM. 315
" Not imicli better."
^^Well, really that tyrannous old gentleman has
lived quite long enough," laughed Strathmore, as he
moved down the terrace steps. " I want you to have
that Hurstwood property, the timber is magnificent.
What do you think of Milly Mostyn ? lovely figure,
hasn't she? Only, unluckily, some wicked fellows
do say it is sadly fictitious, and disappears when her
maid disrobes her."
"We're often tricked in that way," laughed Erroll.
But the laugh was forced, and he pulled his cap down
over his eyes as they walked on under the limes and
across the lawn of Marion Vavasour's rose-gardens,
Strathmore talking to a spaniel of hers, that had
run after and leapt 'upon him a beautiful creature
with a collar of silver bells. Erroll glanced at the
spaniel as they strolled on in silence farther, and
a bitter, haggard smile came on his face. " She
caresses you to-night she will caress me to-morrow
and a German Prince or a French Due the next
day!"
Strathmore laughed slightly; his laugh had a
peculiar intonation ; it was not often that it warmed,
but rather chilled.
" Poor Bonbon ! How severe you are on her.
What has she done to deserve such philippics ? "
" Nothing ! She merely made me think that she
strangely resembles her mistress ! "
" Her mistress ! " repeated Strathmore. He hated
to hear the name of Marion Vavasour spoken by any.
316 STEATHMOEE.
" Your remark is open to an odd construction, Erroll ;
what do you mean by it ? "
Erroll swung round and paused wliere they now
stood, under the limes in the midst of Lady Vava-
sour's gardens, nothing near them but the night
birds, which swept with a swift rush through the
foliage, fleeing to refuge before the storm nothing
watching them but the quick lustrous eyes of the
dog, that glanced rapidly from one to the other.
" Strathmore ! do you believe now in the love of
that woman as you did twelve months ago ? "
" To the full."
The answer was mild as yet, but Strathmore's eyes
were beginning to glitter coldly and angrily. Of all
things, he hated his personal fefelings to be probed,
his personal matters touched.
" What ! " broke in Erroll ; his manner was utterly
changed from its usual soft and lazy nonchalance,
and his words were spoken by hoarse, abrupt efforts.
" What ! you are as mad about her, then, as you were
a year ago : You never see you never think "
Strathmore laughed a little again, more chillily
than before :
" My dear Erroll ! a year before you were so good
as to intrude your counsels on me 'pray don't be
at the trouble to repeat them. I bore rather ill
with your interference then, I may do so still worse
now."
" Bear with it as you will ! but do you mean to tell
me, then, that, arch coquette as Marion Yavasour is,
-
THE BROODING OF THE STORM. 31 7
you are mad, blind, infatuated enough to believe she
will for ever "
" ^ For ever ' is a word for fools," interrupted
Strathmore, with his chilliest smile ; " even forbear-
ance will not last ^ for ever,' if it be tried too far, as
you take a fancy to try it to-night ! "
"For God's sake, do not let our friendship be
broken for her! " muttered Erroll, with so strange a
vehemence and pain that the spaniel. Bonbon, jumped
upon him, whining plaintively. " It will stay by us
when all the women's love on earth has rotted out of
our hands do not let her destroy it ! "
"Faugh! " said Strathmore, with contemptuous
impatience. "If we had left the ladies' presence
at supper, I should say our good host the Marquis's
wine had got in your head, mon cher ! The duration
or rupture of our entente cordiale lies in your own
choice ; all I beg of you is, cease to meddle with my
private matters. I must take the liberty to remind
you, that you are neither my keeper nor my father-
confessor ! "
Strathmore's words were light, sneering, and cold :
such, flung at a man in a moment of high excitement,
keen suffering, and strong feeling, are like ice-water
flung on flames; they came so now to Erroll, and
on this spur he said, what else might never have
passed his lips.
" You must be a madman or a fool, Strathmore ! "
he broke in hotly and quickly. " I do not want to
be your confessor, to see that you are fettered hand
318 STEATIIMORE.
and foot. It is no secret now, you never attempt
to keep it so. You are tlie slave of lier idlest caprice,
you are utterly chained and infatuated by her all
the world sees it. It is a thing publicly and plainly
known enough. Men jest and jeer over it ! "
"Because they envy it as perhaps you do ?"
"They ridicule you behind your back," went on
Erroll, hurriedly, not noticing (or evading) the sneer,
which was all the more cutting for its tranquillity.
"I tell you what they sneaks and cowards only
say out of your hearing. You have no will of your
own with her she rules you as she pleases. Great
Heavens ! can you make such a byword of your
name, such a wreck of your ambition, for the sheer
sake of this wanton adultress ! "
"Silence!"
The word hissed out on the air like the ring of a
bullet. The black, silent wrath of his vengeful race
glared in Strathmore's eyes till they gleamed like
steel, and he turned away with a smile that had
darker meaning in it than the hottest fury, or
menace, that could have shaped themselves in oaths
or words.
" I should shoot any one else dead for that to-mor-
row morning. I do not need to say our acquaintance-
ship ceases from to-night ? Bonbon, ma belle, allons
nous en ! Voila la pluie qui tomber
He moved away with a low and punctilious bow of
contemptuous courtesy ; but with a sudden movement
Erroll swung round and stood before him in the path ;
THE BEOODING OF THE STORM. 'ol9
in the yellow moonlight his face looked very pale,
and the nerves of his lips twitched under his mous-
taches.
" Stop ! we shall not part like that !"
They stood face to face in the middle of Marion
Vavasour's paradise of flowers, while the first storm-
drops fell among the leaves above head slowly one by
one, and the garish light of the moon, which looked
duskily red against the clouds, strayed in streaks
across the darkness.
" Wait a moment ! " Erroll's voice was thick as
he spoke, and shook slightly. " I risked death for you
once, I would do it again to-night. We have lived,
and shared, and thought together, as though the
same mother had borne us. We have not prated
about it like boys, but we have held each other closer
than men of the same blood do. We never had an
evil word between us till she brought them. Strath-
more ! is all that to be swept away in a single
night r'
The words were more eloquent by feeling than
they were by rhetoric ; they would have softened
most men : Strathmore they did not even touch.
He stood with his arms folded and his cigarette in his
mouth, while his face wore its darkest, deadliest
scorn. Wlien his will was crossed, his wrath was
roused, or his pride touched, the man was bronze;
words could not scathe, pity could not stir, memory
could not soften him. Once his glance grew a little
gentler, it was at Erroll's first words; but it soon
320^ STKATHMOKE.
passed away, and the merciless scoff set on liis lips
again.
" You are admirably theatrical ! but we are not play-
ing ^ Hernani ' now, and I should prefer that we used
the language of gentlemen. It is sad waste of stage-
talent, and I should like fewer phrases and more
rational ones ! Lady Vavasour can in no way be
charged with having caused the ^evil words' you
speak of ; you have only yourself to thank for them
by your madman's conduct, and by your very marked
insolence to me. Be so good as to oblige me by
letting me pass?"
" Not yet," swore Erroll, between his teeth ; a hot
flush had come on his face, and his eyes were excited ;
Strathmore's words cut him to the quick, less for
their insult, than their chill and mocking heartless-
ness. " You insult me for her sake ^you turn against
me because I tell you frankly what all your friends
and enemies say with one voice behind your back
because I seek to warn you against your insane be-
lief, your wretched slavery, with a wanton coquette,
a titled courtezan ? What if I told you she were faith-
less to you 1 "
For an instant the words struck Strathmore like a
shot, and he made one fierce swift panther-like move-
ment, as though to spring upon and rend limb from
limb the man that dared to whisper this thing to him;
then he restrained himself, and laughed a low, cold,
imperious laugh of contempt and of power ; he took
the cigarette leisurely from his lips, and his eyes, that
THE BROODING OF THE STORM. 321
glittered like a furious hawk's, fastened on ErroU
with deadly significance.
" What ! " he said, slowly, and gently w^inding a
loosened leaf round the cigar. " \^liat ? Why, you
would give me your life for the lie, that is all."
" But if I could prove to you that it were true ? "
" Prove it, then ! You have dared to hint it, dare
to make it 2;ood !" hissed Strathmore through his
teeth, where he leaned forward as a boar-hound
strains to leap upon his foes, while the leash holds
him back from the death-grip.
The blood rushed to Erroll's face, staining it crim-
son ; his head sank like a man suddenly and sorely
stricken ; he stood motionless in the still and sultry
night.
" Prove it, if you are not the greatest dastard upon
earth!" hissed Strathmore, his voice vibrating with
the suppressed passion, which was w^orse in men of his
blood than the darkest wrath of a more open and a
quicker spent anger. ^' Prove it, I say, if it is not
the vilest lie that jealousy ever spawned ! "
" My God ! it is the truth I spare you ! "
The words wrung out from him, died on his lips
too low to be overheard, as he forced them back
to silence, by the might of a generous self-sacrifice
which wrestled in conflict with a fiery temptation.
He stood silent, stood to be branded as a liar ! No
other man would have uttered that word to Bertie
Erroll and Hved when the dawn rose.
Strathmore looked at him, in the uncertain shim-
VOL. I. Y
*
322 STEATHMOEE.
mer of the moon that streamed fitfully between them
through the boughs ; and he laughed, tauntingly,
scornfully, imperiously, while a cold exultant light
glittered in his eyes, and a haughty scorn sat on his
lips.
"You dare not? I thought so. Fie, sir, for
shame! So this is cowardice as well as falsehood?
You play in a ne\y 7vie I "
The words cut through the air like the swift whirr
of the sabre, and Erroll stood silent still. The
veins swelled to cords on his temples ; the blood left
his face till it looked white and drawn like a corpse ;
he struggled with a horrible temptation. A word
uttered, a word held back : in this lay the whole gist
of a great self-sacrifice, and of a great revenge; in
this lay the whole powers of his choice. With a
word he could strike down the man who stood there
in the yellow weirdly light, scorning, and taunting,
and thrusting liar and coward in his teeth. With
a word he could cast him out of the paradise where
he had lain so long, cast him out of every one of
its sweet hours, every one of its honeyed draughts ;
with a word he could turn his exultant idolatry to
loathing hate, to bitter shame. With a word ! And
that word he was gibed and dared to utter !
It was a deadly struggle, but the past, with all its
boyish memories, was closer knit about his heart
than about the heart of him whose laugh was grating
on his ear, and whose insults were falling on his
brain like drops of fire. His head drooped, his lips
THE BROODING OF THE STOEM. 323
moved faintly, and he muttered like a man in his
extremity :
" God give me strength to keep silent !"
The words were very low, and were unheard, as the
night-birds cleft the air with a rushing sound, and the
winds rising swept up with a moan through the trees
the moan of the storm afar off.
A moment more, and he lifted his head with a
gesture of proud grace; he chose to endure insult,
aspersion, wrong, rather than do what he held in his
power to do now lay the burden on the shoulders,
and turn the steel back into the breast of the man who
had been his brother in all save the ties of blood.
" Since you deem it a falsehood, hold it one Watch
your own treasure ! For the sake of the past, I let
pass your words ; / can afford to be called a co\yard.
Strathmore ! if we must p^rt, let it be in peace."
He held out his hand as he spoke, and his voice
grew mellow as music ; the moonlight fell full upon his
face, with its fair and fearless beauty, while his eyes
were soft with the wistful, forgiving, lingering gaze
of a woman. The look, the words, the action, should
have unlocked a flood of olden memories and thoughts
of youth, and should have swept away, as the light of
morning sweeps aside an evil dream, all the dark and
pitiless passions which a few seconds had been long
enough to beget and bring to birth. But in the
tangled web of Strathmore' s nature ran one hell-
woven thread in anger he was pitiless, in revenge
relentless. With his sneer on his lips he signed aside
324 STEATHMOHE.
the offered hand, and in the ghastly light his eyes
looked into those which met him with gallant fear-
lessness and wistful tenderness : but his own neither
changed nor softened.
"You might know me better I never forgive !"
And with those brief, calm words he tmnied and
passed across the sward, followed by Lady Vavasour's
spaniel. Once, when he had reached the marble
piazza of the villa, he turned and glanced at the night,
as he called the dog to follow him. Erroll was out of
sight. There were only the heavy darkness, which
hung like a pall above the earth, and the angry moon,
gleaming blood-red where she glared through the mist.
The roar of the winds was rising louder, and from
afar off the thunder broke, subdued and sullenly.
The storm was near at hand.
CHAPTER I.
THE ASHES IN THE LAMP.
There was no moment when Lady Vavasour was
so resistless as in negligee in her own dressing-room.
With half the pearls and diamonds of her regalia
glittering on her in the presence-chamber of St.
James's or the Tuileries, though perhaps more daz-
zling, she was less dangerous, than reclining among
her cushions like the odalisque of a harem, with the
light softly shaded and the air scented with attar of
roses, with her shower of hair unloosed, and the folds
of some texture, white as snow ? or delicate in colour-
ing as the blush on the opal, half enshrouding, half
unveiling her, as the sea-foam the goddess* She was
so lovely, thenj at midnight or morning ; and it was a
privacy wherein so few saw her, while of even those
few, each believed himself the only one I
Strathraore looked at her where she lay, with her
VOL. II. b
2 STRATHMORE.
feet softly sheathed in pearl-broidered slippers, and a
slight smile of amused reverie just parting her lips.
It was the morning after Hernani, and he thought of
the hint that had been thrown out to him the night
before, with disdainful ridicule, and bitter scorn of
the man who had employed such methods to implant
the lie he had not even dared repeat. Long ago at
White Ladies he had suspected where the root of
Erroirs bitterness upon her lay ; in the last few weeks
at Auteuil his suspicion had strengthened into cer-
tainty, and this morning, as he felt her hand wander
over his brow where he lay at her feet, he repented
that he had allowed the memory of any friendship to
stay him, and that he had not washed out with fitter
punishment the coward envy that had sought to re-
venge itself on him by the suggestion of a hideous
suspicion. Truly all better things are swept away
betwixt men, when once the face of a woman has
come between them !
u What are you thinking of, caro ? " she asked him,
softly touching his hair.
" I was thinking how many would make you faith-
less to me if they could."
"What a wide field for speculation there are
hundreds ! Well, if they succeeded, I should not ex-
pect you to complain."
" Hush ! Do not jest about that."
" Why not ? " she laughed. " Love wisely taken is
a jest, you know. You would have no right to com-
plain, Cecil. One may be queen of all the world, but
THE ASHES IN THE LAMP. 3
not sovereign of Oneself; and our hearts are like Ben
Jonson's ' blow-balls, 1 now here, now there, wherever
the winds of chance and caprice like to float them.
Indeed, I should expect you to take your conge with
the most tranquil grace. Come ! what would you do
if I said I loved you no longer? "
The question was asked with that mocking malice
which was part and parcel of her nature ; this deli-
cate, youthful creature loved to torture I His pas-
sionate eyes looked up into hers with the jealous love
of Othello,
"Do I God knows ! Take your life or ray own
or both!" -
The answer was not wholly a jest, too tleep a mean-
ing lay In the look he fastened on her and the uncon-
scious vibration of his voice ; and, for once, she felt a
vague terror at the force of the love she had delighted
to excite and feed, till it lost all reason in its madness 5
for once she felt that she had roused what she could
not so easily allay, and that the weakness she triumphed
and tyrannised over, was a strength which might one
day menace her, when no words of hers would lie able
to soothe it away. For the moment she feared the work
of her own will, the next she gloried in her power,
and laughed, her white fingers caressingly wandering
among the dark chesnut waves of his hair.
"What a horrible answer, Cecil ! Onewoidd think
we were in the Cinque Cento! You swift, silent
Strathmores have much mere of the Italian in you
than of the English nature. You ought to be a Co-
B2
4 STRATHMORE.
lonna or a Malatesta, with the steel in your sleeve,
and the poison in your ring. What! has one love
become so necessary to you, that life Would be un-
bearable without it? Oh, Lucifer, Son of Morning,
how art thou fallen ! "
" But my fall has opened heaven to me, not exiled
me from it," smiled Strathmore, as he lay at her feet.
"Why do you wonder at my answer? Love has
turned to crime in its agony more than once since the
world began."
" Perhaps but not in our world "
"Where passion enters all worlds have the same
law ! You have made me learn the same madness as
an Israelite learnt from Mariamne a thousand years
ago, as twice a thousand a Spartan learnt from Cle-
onice.
" Who both taught it to be slain by it ! What an
ominous souvenir ! You would not slay me, Cecil ? "
And the loosened tresses swept against his brow,
and her eyes looked laughingly yet lovingly into his.
"Almost I could, rather than other eyes should
feast on you. Ah, Marion ! when men love as I love,
they loathe the very daylight to look on what they
idolise."
" Tu es fou" she interrupted him, but the words
were spoken so softly that they were themselves a
caress. " It is a madness, Cecil ! But why, I wonder,
are men who love us as you do, imperiously, avari-
ciously, jealously, and would hate us as pitilessly,
THE ASHES IN THE LAMP. 5
always most dear to women? Why! It is very
tour
"Why? Because you know no love, worth the
name, ever yet bore the shadow of a share in what It
loved ; because you delight to feel yourselves the mis-
tresses of a man's life, and taste your power to give
him misery or rapture, to yield him a god's delight, or
cast him out to worse torture than the cursed I To
learn how men can love, women must be loved as I
love you/*
u Ah, my cold, proud Strathmore, what lava flames
lay beneath the ice! n she murmured, while the smile
still hovered on her lips, u You did not know your
own nature till I loved you I ?I
As she stooped towards him, her caress lingering on
his brow, the forward movement dislodged a note
which lay among the laces, silks, and Eastern stuffs
piled on her luxurious couch, so that it fell, with its
superscription upward, upon Strathmore's arm. He
took it up to throw it towards a table which stood
near, attaching no import to it, but Lady Vavasour
with a quick movement interposed her hand, and as
he gave it to her he caught sight of the handwriting.
Coupled with the memories of the night that was
just passed, it struck on Strathmore with a keener
suspicion _
"You correspond with Erroll?" he said, quickly,
keeping the note in his hand,
" I invite him to dinner, and he answers me," she
6 8TEATHM0EE.
said, carelessly, with a little half-suppressed yawn;
"and I do it pretty often, since he is so adored a
friend of yours/'
" Is this a dinner acceptation ? "
" No, a refusal. I fancy Milly Mostyn said some-
thing about his going back to England."
She had moved her hand again as if to receive the
note, but had checked herself, and lay with her head
resting on her arm, with negligent grace, and her
lashes drooping languidly. Nothing could be more
easily indifferent than her manner, but as his eyes
fastened on her, a, faint colour deepened the sea-shell
bloom on her cheeks, and Strathmore noted it with
the swift Moor-like jealousy that always runs in leash
with such a love as his. On his impulse he would
have wrenched the envelope open ; honour and cour-
tesy compelled him to restrain himself, kit he did not
give up the note.
"Will you permit me to read this? I have my
reasons," he asked her. He believed she might re-
sent, but could not refuse him,
"No!"
The single prohibition was uttered with disdainful
nonchalance and haughty sovereignty; the superb
and graceful indignation of a proud woman subjected
to a doubt that is insult.
" No ? Why not ? You claim your right to my
confidence, I claim my title to yours."
She raised herself upon her arm from her cushions,
with questioning wonder in her eyes, and a smile of
THfc ASHES IN THE LAMP. 7
scorn upon her lips she, Marion Vavasour, to be
arraigned in judgment by a lover who was as wax in
her bands, and whom she oould have bent to any sin,
or any folly, at her ward! She to be doubted, ques-
tioned, opposed !
u Confidence ! " she re-echoed, with a scornful curl
on her lovely lips, and an angry light in her eyes, very
new to them, for Marion Vavasour was by nature of a
sunny, insouciant temper, rarely troubled by irritation
or bitterness. "What confidence can be needed in
such a trifle? You have lost your senses, Cecil, I
think. Certainly, since you presume to disbelieve
my word, I shall not allow you to insult me by veri-
fying it."
" It is not I who have lost my senses, but you your
memory, Madame," said Strathmore, the black jealousy
in him leaping into sudden life. " Discourteous or not,
I must doubt either your word or your recollection.
This is a strangely lengthy * dinner refusal.' "
The letter, which had half fallen from its envelope,
was of four pages, closely covered with many lines.
For an instant her colour deepened and then died out,
leaving her cheek pale, her eyes sank beneath his, and
her fluent tongue was silent. Strathmore rose to his
feet, grasping the letter in his hand, a hideous sus-
picion eoiling round him, and the jealous love in him
working up in silence,
" Since you must be in error as regards its meaning,
Lady Vavasour, do you now permit me to read this
mere ' dinner refusal ? ' "
& STRATHMOBE. '
"No!*
And as the single word was launched from her lips
in haughty denial, with the swift movement peculiar
to her she raised herself from her pile of cushions,
caught the note in her hand, twisting it by a rapid
action from his hold, and held it to a spirit-lamp, that
was burning liquid perfume on the table, which stood,
with her coffee, at her elbow. The flame caught, it
flared alight, and shrivelling in a second, the note fell,
a harmless heap of light grey ashes, into the jasper
saucer of the lamp, its words destroyed, its secret
safe. Then she laughed softly and amusedly at her
own success her mood changing like a child's.
"Amigo mio," she said, gaily, "never oppose a
woman she will always outwit you! While you
have but one mode of Menace, we have a thousand
resources of Finesse ! "
Lady Vavasour was laughing, tranquil, at her ease
again, now that the note was floating among the liquid
perfume in ashes which could tell no tales. Done in
one moment, ere he could arrest her hand or avert the
flame, the action literally for that moment confounded
Strathmore, and struck him dumb ; the next, the ab-
horred suspicion seemed written in letters of flame
before his eyes. His love, though an utter slavery in
its bondage, was imperious in its dark and bitter
jealousy ; the blood rushed over his forehead, and his
teeth clenched hard, as he saw the ashes fall into the
essence, and heard her low, soft laugh of triumph.
" That letter holds a secret so dear that you destroy
THE ASHES IN THE LAMP. 9
it ! So be it, then ! I will wrench it out of the man
who shares it ! "
He moved to leave her presence, but, before he
could escape her, she raised herself from her couch,
and laid her hand on his arm the hand that could
hold him closely as a chain of iron :
" Cecil, you must be mad ! Wait and listen to me."
Every word of her voice he was used to obey as
though he had no law save her will; but the very
weakness of the love she had triumphed over, made
its ferocity when crossed with the looming shadow
of the slightest rivalry ; now he threw her hand off
him.
" Listen ! you have palmed one falsehood off on j
me, already, why wait for another ? Your own secrets
you must keep as you will, but the man who shares
them shall answer to me "
u You are mad, Cecil ! " cried Marion Vavasour
again, her eyes lighting with pretty coutemptuous
anger, as of a spoiled beauty crossed in her will,
while the slender hand closed still on his arm with a
movement that, slight as it was, might betray anxiety.
" I forbid you to do any such thing ! My name dis-
puted over, as over some dancer's, or rosiere's! I
forbid it I will not have it ! "
" Let me go ! " said Strathmore, so rife with passion
that he scarce knew or heeded what he said. " Let
me go ! You have lied to me, and I will know what
made the need of a lie. You burnt the letter, lest I
should even see one word ; I have a right to know
10 STBATHMORE.
what those words were which must have been faith-
lessness to me ; I cannot grind it from you by force
I will seek it where I can, and, by God ! if "
The words broke asunder unuttered; he could not
put into plain speech the hideous thought which he
would have disbelieved, in the teeth of all evidence on
earth or heaven, save her own witness against her.
His strength went down under the torture of the
mere doubt that she could be faithless to him, and the
oath died away on his lips, which were blanched as
death ; his love swept aside all beyond itself ; to her
he had no pride, and he threw himself beside her,
twining in his hands her loosened hair, and scorching
her brow with his breath.
U I am mad, if you will! My God! have pity on
me. I never stooped to any living thing I stoop to
you ! Give a thought to another you shall not you
cannot ! Far the love of Heaven, tell me what it is
you hide ? "
"No!"
And she thought with a woman's glad, pitiless
idolatry of power how utterly this man loved her !
u Do not trifle with me," muttered Strathmore, in-
coherently twisting round his hands, in his delirious
suffering, the golden meshes of her hair, as though
with that frail bond to knit her to him through life
and death. u Tdl me the truth the truth ! or I
will wrench it from the coward who has robbed me.
No man should thieve even a glance of yours, and
live "
The words were muttered in his throat, fierce in
TEE ASHES IN THE LAMP, 11
their menace, yet imploring in their pain ; his very
life more than his life ! hung on this woman's love.
She saw he was no longer to be played with ; she saw
that every syllable he said would be wrought out ; she
saw that here with his jealous passions loosed he
was no more her slave, but had become her master,
and Marion Vavasour shrank from his grasp and from
his gaze ; she feared the strength of what she had
invoked.
But she was a woman who knew well how to deal
with the men she ruled. Her hand gently touched
his brow, and she stooped towards him with a pitying,
tender smile :
"Ah, Cecil! can you not trust me even in so little?
Sceptic ! you are unjust and cruel ; I but burnt that
letter to spare you pain ! "
" To spare me pain ! Quick ! tell me all all ! "
" No," she whispered, bending till her wooing lips
kissed his brow ; u let it pass. You know I love you
love but you ? Let it pass, my dearest ! "
" Never ! Tell me at once-Mr I seek him this
moment."
She stooped lower still, while her fragrant breath
was warm on his cheek, and her whisper stole on his
ear:
"Then then (let it stir no words between you,
Cecil, for my sake !) but your friend was very
treacherous to you, and that letter spoke a love which
was as hateful to me as it was craven to you. That
is all the truth ! Forgive me its concealment ; I would
so gladly have saved you its pain ! "
12
CHAPTER H.
THE SWOOP Or THE VULTUEE.
An hour afterwards, Strathmore quitted the Bos-
quet de Diane, and took his way across the grounds.
He walked at his usual leisurely pace, he had a cigar
in his mouth, and his manner was tranquil as usual.
But a dog glancing at him would have shrunk
whining and frightened away, and a stranger meeting
him, and looking at the deadly glitter in his eyes
under their drooped lids, would have thought, " that
man is bound on a merciless errand." The hour was
just mid-day, the birds had ceased from song, the
scythe lay among the unshaven grass, the vintagers
afar off had left their work, the very leaves hung stir-
less. All nature was calm and at rest all, save the
same passions which have drenched the laughing earth
in blood, and mocked the sweet, hushed stillness of the
summer skies, and made the fair day hideous with
their riot, since the suns of Asia shone on the white,
THE SWOOP OF THE VULTUEE.
13
upturned face of the First Dead, and the corse was
branded on the brow of Cain,
Stratlimore crossed the gardens without haste in
his steps, his hand closing on a little cane ; the blood
of his race ran unchanged hi his veins, dark with that
ruthless wrath which had never yielded to the memory
of mercy, the prayers of pity, or the rights of justice,
and which had scathed all out of its path, as the
scythe sweeps the seeding-grass. To the woman he
had quitted he had said but little ; but he left her to
revenge the coward who would have robbed him, by
such chastisement as men do not speak of to women.
Less fully told than hinted at, less gathered by de-
liberate evidence than grasped in all its broad, ac-
cursed meaning, the treachery stood out black and
bare before him. In his revenge he would have
spared no living thing that could have risen up
betwixt him and it; had he known of any darker,
fuller, fouler, which his birth and breeding could have
permitted, or the age and the world allowed, he would
have made the man he now hated drain it to the last
drop- He had left her, soothing her fears, promising
her no violence left her, with the passions in his
blood, that in darker ages far back, had trodden out
hnman life pitilessly and recklessly, as so much waste
water spilt, and had scored down w-ith unrelenting
bitterness the ruthless motto of a ruthless race, u Slay I
and spare not."
He walked across the grounds alone once he
glanced up. The radiant day seemed hot with flame,
14 STKATHMOKE.
and the cloudless heavens looked brazen in the light.
But he went onward, still calmly, leisurely as before,
but with the bloodhound's thirst growing stronger and
stronger within him, and set but on one goal. What
are our passions, once let loose, but sleuth-hounds
freed from leash, which run down afl before them,
and hunt on even to the death ?
A breadth of sward alone separated the maisonette
of Lady Vavasour from the villa beyond. He opened
the gates and passed on, leaving the paradise of roses
behind him. Through the glades of trees the terrace
which ran before the villa was visible, and a group of
men were standing there. Three of them were
strangers to him, the fourth was Enroll, who was
standing with a brace of setters at his feet, behind
him the open window of the dark oak library he had
just quitted, before him all the light of the summer
noontide.
Strathmore saw him and his hand clenched down
on the cane he held, that dainty jewelled switch,
fragile and costly enough for a lady's riding-whip.
As the sun flickered through the branches on to his
face it was calm and impassive, but there was a cruel
smile about his mouth, and his grey eyes were black
and lustrous, with a fierce, eager light.
The setters as he approached gave tongue, and
Erroll turned. He was talking with them of Court
beauties, of Blois races, of the baccarat at Lilli
Dofah's, of all the trifles and the chit-chat of an
ordinary Paris day ; for we smoke and gossip and
THE SWOOP OP THE VTJLTUBE. 15
laugh and dine while oar lives are making shipwreck,
and all we value is drifting away to the greedy, tide-
less, sea of a fathomless past, that will never give
bade its dead.
As he looked up his face brightened he thought
Strathmore was come for a tacit reconciliation.
Enough had been said twelve hours before to have
steeled him to any such feeling ; but his nature was
not capable of harbouring revenge : he forgave freely
-as he would have forgiven now, even such epithets
as men never pardon, for the sake of all those thou-
sand memories of childhood, and of manhood, that
were still warm about his heart, not even to be
washed out, and trampled from remembrance, by
the tide of a jealous love, or by the sting of a bitter
feud.
He looked up, a smile of pleasure lighting his eyes,
which had been heavy and worn before; and Strath-
more saw him as he came up the turf terrace the
man who had once flung himself in his defence into
the near grip of death, who had been with him in
shifting scenes of danger, pleasure, revel, or privation,
and who had trusted him and shared his trust, as
though the same mother had borne them, since they
had been children together playing with the fallen
chesnuts, or wading in the shallow estuaries under the
woods of White Ladies, far away in England. Strath-
more saw him, and his hand closed tighter on the
switch, with which he moved out of his path the
curling tendrils of the clematis. The revenge of men
16 STBATHMORE.
of his blood had always been swift and silent, but
'they had always tasted it, slowly yet thirstily, drop by
drop, with the fierce delight of the vulture, as it
sweeps and circles above its prey before it swoops
down to wrench and tear. /
He went up the terrace-slope' leisurely, and lifted
his hat with suave courtesy, the soft ceremony in
which the Strathmores of White Ladies had ever
clothed their deadliest approach, the silky velvet glove
which they had ever drawn over the merciless iron
hand whose grip was death.
Erroll stood leaning against the side of the window;
he could not make the first movement towards a tacit
reconciliation, but he was ready to meet, to more than
meet, one. He only needed his friend's hand stretched
out to him in- silence, to give his own, and mutely
forgive the worst words which had been uttered
twelve hours before.
"Pardon, messieurs!" said Strathmore, quietly
passing the other men, while they parted to let him
approach : as the sun fell on it, his face wore a strange
look, out of keeping with the easy suavity of his
manner. He moved on to the library window, where
Erroll stood, with the sunlight full upon his face.
Calmly, as though he tendered them a cigar, Strath-
more glanced round him at the three other men, with
a bitter evil scorn about his lips.
" Gentlemen ! is there any answer save one cus-
tomary to a lie ? "
The men young fellows surprised and embafr-
THE SWOOP OP THE VULTUBE. 17
rassed, hesitated ; Enroll looked up, the angry blood
lushing hotly to his face; but he stretched out his
hand with an in voluntary gesture.
"Strathmore! you are in gross error 1 Come
within here a moment ; I must have one more word
with you."
* Words are not my answer ! "
And as the syllables left his lips, hurled out in
blind and deadly fury, he lifted bis right arm, the
jewelled handle of the cane flashed in the sunlight,
the switch swirled through the air like a flail, with a
shrill sound, and in the swiftness of a second bad
struck a broad, livid mark across Erroll's brow, brutal
as a death-stroke, ineffaceable as shame.
" TJiat for your treachery to me. I will have your
life for your love for her."
The words were hissed in ErroH's ear as the blow
fell, low but distinct as the hiss of a snake, chill as
steel, relentless as death, As he reeled back, for the
moment staggered and blinded, Strathmore's eyes
fastened on the swollen crimson bar, where the switch
had cut its mark^ with the steady, pitiless greed for
revenge that, fed to the full, yet clamoured still for
more. In the blazing glare of the hot noon the vile,
ineffaceable insult seemed stamped on the living flesh
in letters of flame, which nothing in past, or present,
or future, could ever cover or wash out, for which
blood alone could ever atone he laughed a low, chill,
mocking laugh, Breaking the switch in two, be
tlirew the fragments down at the feet of the man he
vol. ii, c
18 STRATHMOKE.
had struck, his eyes glittering exultant, the veins in
his face black and swollen in the fury of his wrath,
a scornful smile set about his lips, as he turned to the
others with a slight bow of careless courtesy :
" Gentlemen ! you are my witnesses " but
Erroll's hand struck his lips to silence with a force
that would have sent a weaklier man hurled back-
ward to the earth. "By God! you must answer
this."
The oath rattled in his throat, his face was white,
save where the red out stood out across his brow ; his
voice was hoarse and his breath stifled as the words
gasped out; the suddenness of the foul indignity
seemed to have paralysed in him all save the sheer
instinct of its revenge, and to have numbed and
stricken even that.
"With pleasure!"
"Where?"
The single word came from Erroll's throat hoarse
and suffocated with passion.
" In the Deer-park of the Bois, by the pond, if it
suit you."
"Your hour?"
" At sunset to-night ? I am engaged until then."
" I shall await you."
"Soit!"
With those few rapid words all was said ; all had
been done and spoken in less than sixty seconds, swift
as thought and breathless as passion, staggering and
bewildering those who looked on like the sudden flash
THE SWOOP OF THE VULTURE. 19
of lightning in their eyes. Then he turned, bowed
low to those standing by, passed along the terrace
and took his way across the lawn back to the Bosquet
de Diane. He was well content. Half his vengeance
was wrought, the rest could not now escape him. He
thought of the brutal and ineffaceable insult he had
given with pitiless delight; of all yet to come he
thought as thirstily ; the jealous hatred and the re-
vengeful greed that were within him could only be
sated with one requital life ! Life ! which in a few
hours' time would be in his hands and at his mercy.
Mercy, I say ? the word has nothing to do with him ;
it was not in his blood nor in his creed. As ruthlessly
as he had dealt out insult, he had it in him now to
deal out death.
Once he glanced upward at the sky above-head, and
as the hot beams fell on his eyes, across his pitiless and
exultant thoughts, there strayed by some strange chain
of memory, old familiar words, unheard, unread since
childhood : u Let not the sun go down upon thy wrath."
The sun was high in the noontide heavens, shining
without shadow an the day that was at its full the
day that had dawned to be weighted with the wail of
new lives, and the sighs of dying lips, with the burden
of crowding crimes, and the bitterness of human words,
with the cry of the slaughtered in far-off battle-fields,
and the pent breathing of the toilers in great cities.
When the sun should sink and the day fade into night,
who should call back warmth to the lips they had seen
close for ever; who should render unsaid the words
c2
20 STRATHMOBC
they had heard curse the living; who should have
power to hid them return to restore the deeds undone,
the sin un wrought, the graves unsealed, and yield back
the hours garnered to the past?
The old words, with their grand simplicity of counsel
and of warning, crossed his memory; words which
mark the short day all too long for men's wrath to
endure. God forgive him ! Strathmore only thought
how, when that sun should rise to light another day,
there should be one lost from amongst the numbers of
the living, one human life the less upon the peopled
earth!
Furies' passions blinded him with their accursed
lust, and his soul was set on vengeance vengeance
that would know no pity, and yield no shrive.
From the sultry glare of the terrace he passed by
abrupt transition into the aisles of the rose-gardens,
into the midst of gay groups gathered about Marion
Vavasour ; and, with a game of life and death to be
played out before the sun went down, he joined in
with the jests, the impromptu, the epigram, the graceful
flatteries, as lightly and laughingly as any there. There
was not a sign by which to tell his past errand, not a
glimpse to disclose the purpose on to which his will
was set ; yet there was one whom the easy wit did not
blind, whom the careless nonchalance did not deceive,
and at first the bloom had wavered anxiously on her
cheek, quickly, however, to be succeeded by an amused,
exultant light in her gazelle eyes.
Like Ounigunde, she loved well to see those whom
THE SWOOP OF THE VULTURE. 21
she had ensnared reel up to dizzy heights, and stagger
downwards to yawning chasms, courting death, and
wasting life, to feast her eyeS with proof of her own
power.
" Come to me in a few minutes," she said, in a low
tone, as she passed into the house an hour or two
after. Her idlest whisper was his law, and he obeyed,
entering her boudoir, where the light stole subdued,
and dreamy oriental odours filled the air.
She stood by an etagfere of flowers, idly toying
with their blossoms, and turned towards him as he ap-
proached, with the imperious grace that so well be-
came her :
"Where had you been, Cecil, when you came into
the rose-garden ? "
" To the stables. I know how you value Mazeppa,
too well to leave her to the stud-grooms."
The answer was careless and natural; there was
nothing to indicate that the reply was even an evasion ;
but Lady Vavasour made a gesture of impatience.
"Mazeppa and I thank you much, but you came
by the west gate of the gardens ; the stables lie to the
south. Never play with me, never evade me, it is
utterly useless ! You had been to Bertie Erroll ? "
"Indeed, no. You are distressing yourself most
needlessly, my dearest ! " (
Strathmore spoke softly and persuasively ; he was
solicitous to guard from her even a suspicion of what
was unfitting for her ear and her sex in the work
which was wrought by her own beauty.
22 STBATHMOBE.
" Hush ! " she said, petulantly, her eyes glancing
into his, with the gaze with which she knew she could
have made him lay bard the dearest secret that ever
locked in honour. " You are only deceiving me, Cecil,
You have broken your word ; you have taken revenge
when you promised me to forbear it."
"Well! I do not come of an ovei-forbearing
race."
He spoke with a slight smile a smile that, mo-
mentary as it was, struck a chill to her like the touch
of cold steel. She shuddered for an instant as she
caught a glimpse of what this man's revenge might be ;
shuddered as though with a prophetic dread of the
future that dread which romancists idly call u pre-
sentiment," but which is often only the reflected colour,
thrown before our steps, from our own past acts and
follies, as our shadow falls in advance of us as we
walk.
" What did you say to him ? " she asked, quickly.
And the light was so shaded, that the flush of a
certain anxiety which came and went in her cheek
escaped him* As great sovereigns have feared their
most abject slaves, when the might of their own
tyranny has roused proportionate might of passion in
those who have long bent the knee to their word, so
she now began to fear this man, whose love, now his
weakness, might so soon become his strength a
strength to crush its tyrant.
" What did you say to him ? " she repeated, im-
patiently. " I mil know, Strathmore ! "
THE SWOOP OP THE VULTUEE. Z6
He saw that she already guessed too truly to be
evaded longer, and her will in its lightest caprice lay
on him like an iron chain, dragging him where it
would.
"I said nothing. I am not fond of words."
"What was it that you did, then? "
"Do not ask, my loveliest I These are not themes
for a woman's ear."
"But I wUl know!"
" Why ? It is not a subject for you. Be content,
your name is involved in no way. You may surely
trust me to guard against that ! "
"But I will know !" There wa* all her wilful,
imperious witching tyranny in the words and in the
gesture with which she spoke them. "What have
you done ? "
"I have treated him as I should treat a hound that
bit me."
Even though he spoke to a woman,, he could not
restrain the pitiless passion that vibrated through his
voice, and she understood without translation.
"And he?"
" He has but one course open. A coward would
have to meet me, and he is not that."
An eager, exultant gladness lightened in her eyes,
a flushed warmth came on her cheek, her graceful
loveliness grew instinct, for one fleeting instant, with
the fierceness of the panther as it rises for its spring ;
for one instant, while it lent to her beauty a glow
almost fearful, a life almost terrible, the dark revenge
24 sxs^ra. as*
of a Theodora was grven. 31 a agycmu soft and
radiant as the morning.
"You are rt^rit yoa are riricj* she said, with
nervous force. ~/was wrccj: who bid you star your
hand. Revenue it! Revenue becomes tout nee!
Could I think you would submit to such rank
treachery; sit silent under such pernYhoas rivalry!
Revenge it, Strathmore ! You are right."*
The fierce words came strangehr from those soft
lips, that only parted with sweet laughter, or gave a
wooing caress. Her hand closed upon the rich
blossoms among which it wandered, crushing and
breaking them. She stood there, fatal in her
dazzling loveliness, fascinating him, confirming to
fresh strength every evil instinct in him, inciting
to yet darker deed every worst passion of his soul,
luring and tempting him to the impending crime
which grew holier and dearer to him with every
instant that drew him nearer to its act.
If he had loved her ere now, in this hour he adored
her ! The passion of his own nature found answering
echo, spur, and unison in hers. In his mood then, a
woman who had stood between him and his wrath
would have been hurled out of his path, though he
had worshipped her; the woman who spurred him to
his revenge became thrice idolised, as her voice spoke
the thoughts, and goaded the lusts, of his heart. He
crushed her in a close embrace.
" Be content 1 No man should seek to rob me of
your love, and livel"
THE SWOOP OP THE VULTUBE. 25
" But ah, my God ! I forgot. If your life should
pay forfeit ! "
The words died on her lips, her face was blanched,
her eyes filled with the sudden terror of a horrible re-
membrance, the piteous fear of a ghastly thought
now she was but a woman, who loved !
" That I must risk. But whether my own life fall
or not, my revenge will not escape me."
While he soothed and thanked her with his caresses,
the answer, brief as it was, was pregnant with mean-
ing. With the dews of death heavy upon him, and
the mists of death blinding his eyes, he would still
find strength to keep his grip upon his vengeance, and
to take it standing on the brink of a yawning grave,
which would, at the least, close over both.
"But Cecil Cecil your own danger!"
It was the anguished cry of a woman's love, im-
ploring in its terror, yearning in its tenderness, shrink-
ing in horror from the near approach of a fatal hour
for him whom she holds dear, or, it was the most
marvellous and matchless acting with which the false
breath of a woman's lips ever yet duped man ?
"Do not think of it, my worshipped one ; think as
little as I ! But if it chance so, if I never look upon
your face again, kiss my lips when they are cold, kiss
my eyes when they are closed, that your love may be
with me in my grave ; and remember, my love for you
was such, that when my life was at its sweetest, when
my years were at their richest, I died to revenge one
whisper which sought to steal you from me ! "
rf
T:it- 7i ii^r *:.*vt=* ir.t* r?^ M* JBfe. :
nii. f*'ii:~- il.* "::. tiit ii c itrij^ iiiE roar m his
"Li^^r- oi; r-iattr C'i-i-uje i- iJ* tyw Cie first
wium ixac fvtj- nicutrv^ zi urr a t he j.Mfcec her
il i^s* i.n ".?*i-^ mii tii aynE tiai wits the i
Tuire n. j:irtT ^: oJl ? ^ aai tc ire. his eresbefbr
err V_lui cj: a^iij^** tc iwr ae. Her n tens
fell u?jcv ia* brew a* si* "tien iwari s kha: bat her
gia'* j^ii^i xlto ii whl rp^:isTe meaning, her
face 2;r-ieaei whi ii* an: -rzirnr^-tijrst for ve*-
fjeance. a smiie of superb u ium ;'h waac^ioed on her
bpe triumph tn tin* stst, and sire away at wiIL to
death or Lfe* this mai/s entire existence !
u Ah ! tLIs i to be lorel indeed, as poets bate
fabled and as women have dreamed! Strathmore,
revenge yourself and me reren^e ! It b meet and
just. And death shall not scathe too, nor come nigh
yon, my beloved. Yon shall return unharmed, un-
touched, to find your reward here! *
She pressed his hand to her heart, where it beat
warm and quick beneath its costly lace. As she bent
over htm, her voice sank to all its wooing softness, but
thrilling with a new and fiercer meaning, which fos-
tered every darker passion in him, as tropic heat
fosters the poison-plants to seed and blossom, tempt-
ing and goading him to the crime that was sweet in
his vynH as tlie gold-haired Gunhilda in the old Norse-
il*y* wooed Eric the Viking to the sin of Cain. These
woro tho passions that she loved to rouse in men, and
THE SWOOP OF THE VULTUKE.
27
see run riot in their deadly course ; when a whisper, a
caress from her, might have slaked them, her lips only-
fanned the flame !
And here, an eager thirst for revenge craved its
food in her as in him; here, this soft and radiant
creature was cruel as any panther that ever crouched,
any snake that ever reared its brilliant painted crest.
CHAPTER m.
"and the sun west down upox his wrath."
The sun was setting, descending beyond purple
bars of cloud, and leaving a long golden trail behind
it in its track sinking slowly and solemnly towards
the west as the day declined, without rest, yet with-
out haste, as though to give to all the sons of earth,
warning and time, to leave no evil rooted, no bitter-
ness unhealed, no feud to ripen, and no crime to
bring forth seed, when the day should have passed
away to be numbered with hours irrevocable ; and the
night should cast its pall over the dark deeds done,
and seal their graves never to be unclosed. The sun
was setting, shedding its rich and yellow light over
the green earth, on the winding waters, and the blue
hills afar off, and down the thousand leafy aisles close
by. But to one place that warm radiance did not
wander, in one spot the rays did not play, the glory
did not enter. That place was the Deer-pond of the
" AND THE SUN WENT DOWN," 29
old Bois, where the dank plants brooding on the foetid
waters, which only stirred with noisome tilings, had
washed against the floating hair of lifeless womeiij
and the sombre branches of the crowding trees had
been dragged earthward by the lifeless weight of the
self- slain, till the air seemed to be poisonous with
death, and the grasses, as they moved, to whisper to
the winds dread secrets of the Past. There, the light
of the summer evening did not come, but only through
the leafless boughs of one seared tree, which broke
and parted the dark barrier of forest growth, they
saw the west, and the sun declining slowly in its haze
of golden air, sinking downward past the bars of
cloud,
All was quiet, save the dull sound of the parting
waters, when some loathsome reptiles stirred among
its brakes, or the hot breeze moved its pestilential
plants; and in the silence they who had been as
brothers, and who now were foes, stood fronting each
other : in this silence they had met, in it they would
part. And there, on their right hand, through the
break in the dank wall of leaves, shone the Sun, look-
ing earthward, luminous and blinding human sight
like the gaze of God,
The light from the west fell upon Erroll, touching
the fair locks of his silken hair, and shining in his
azure eyes as they looked up at the sunny skies,
where a bird was soaring and circling in space, happy
through its mere sense and joy of life. ' On Strath-
more's face the deep shadows slanted, leaving it as
30 STKATHMORE.
though cast in bronze, chill and tranquil as that of a
marble god's, each feature set into the merciless re-
pose of one immovable purpose. Their faces were
strangely contrasted, for the serenity of the one was
that of a man who fearlessly awaits an inevitable
doom, the serenity of the other that of a man who
mercilessly deals ont an implacable fate ; and while
in the one those present saw but the calmness of
courage and of custom, in the other they vaguely
shrank from a new pud an awful meaning. For
beneath the suave smile of the Duellist, they read the
intent of the Murderer.
The night was nigh at hand, soon the day must be
gathered to the past, such harvest garnered with it as
men's hands had sown throughout its brief twelve
hoars, which are so short in span, yet are so long
m sm.
"Let not the sun go ixwn upon you*
wkath!"
There, across the west, in letters of flame, the
warning of the Hebrew scroll was written on the
purple skies; but he who should have read them
stood immutable yet insatiate, with the gleam of a
tiger's lust burning in his eyes, the lust when it
scents blood; the lust that only slakes its thirst
in life.
They fronted one another, those who had lived as
brothers; while at their feet babbled the poisonous
waters, and on their right hand shone the evening
splendour of the sun. Their eyes met, and in the
" AND THE SUN WENT DOWN." 31
gaze of the one was a compassionate pardon, but in
the gaze of the other a relentless lust.
The duel was a la barriere; and the lot of the
seconds' toss-up fell to Strathmore ; giving him the
right to fire first. They turned, and stood back, to
back ; waiting the signal.
. "One!"
The word fell down upon the silence, and the hiss
of a shrill cicala echoed to it like a devil's laugh.
And the sun sank slowly downward beyond the
barrier of purple cloud, passing away from earth.
"Two!"
Again the single word dropped out upon the still-
ness, marking the flight of the seconds; again the
hoot of the cicala echoed it, laughing hideously from
its noisome marsh.
And the sun sank slowly, still slowly, nearer and
nearer to its shroud of mist, bearing with it all that
lingered of the day.
"Three!"
The white death-signal flickered in the breeze, and
the last golden rays of the sun were still above the
edge of the storm-cloud.
There was yet time.
But the warning was not read : there was the as-
sassin's devffish greed within Strathmore's soul, the
assassin's devilish smile upon his lips; the calmness
of his face never changed, the tranquil pulse of his
wrist never quickened, the remorseless gleam of his
eyes never softened. The doom written in his look
32 STRATHMORE.
never relaxed. He wheeled round in seeming, care-
lessly, as you may turn to aim at carrion birds but
his shot sped home.
One moment Enroll stood erect, his fair hair blow-
ing in the wind, his eyes full open to the light ; then
he reeled slightly backward, raised his right arm,
and fired in the air. The bullet flew far and harmless
amidst the forest foliage, his pistol dropped, and with-
out sign or sound he fell down upon the sodden turf,
his head striking against the earth with a dull echo,
his hands drawing up the rank herbage by the roots,
as they closed convulsively in one brief spasm.
He was shot through the lungs.
The sun sank out of sight, leaving a dusky, sultry
gloom to brood over the noxious brakes and sullen
stagnant waters, leaving the world to Night, as fitting
watch and shroud of Crime; and those who stood
there were stricken with a ghastly horror, paralysed
by a vague and sudden awe, for they knew that they
were in the presence of death, and that the hand
which had dealt it was the hand of his chosen friend.
But he, who had slain him, more coldly, more pitilessly
than the merciful amongst us would slay a dog, stood
unmoved in the shadow, with his ruthless calm, his
deadly serenity, which had no remorse as it had had
no mercy, while about his lips there was a cold and
evil smile, and in his eyes gleamed the lurid flame of
a tiger's triumph the triumph when it has tasted
blood, and slaked its thirst in life.
" Fuyez ! il est mort ! "
" AND THE SUN WENT DOWN," 33
The words, uttered in his ear by Valdor, were hoarse
and almost tremulous ; but he heard and assented to
them unmoved. An exultant light shone and glittered
in his eyes ; he had avenged himself and her ! Life
was the sole price that his revenge had set ; his pur-
pose had been as iron, and his soul was as bronze.
He went nearer, leisurely, and stooped and looked at
the work of his hand. In the gloom the dark-red
blood could yet be clearly seen, slowly welling out
and staining the clotted herbage as it flowed, while
% one stray gleam of light still stole across, as if in love
and pity, and played about the long fair hair which
trailed among the grass.
Life still lingered, faintly, flickeringly, as though
loth to leave for ever that, which one brief moment
before, had been instinct with all its richest glory ; the
eyes opened wide once more, and looked up to the
evening skies with a wild, delirious, appealing pain,
and the lips which were growing white and drawn,
moved in a gasping prayer :
"Oh God! I forgive I forgive. He did not
know !"
Then his head fell back, and his eyes gazed upward
without sight or sense, and murmuring low a woman's
name, "Lucille! Lucille!" while one last breath
shivered like a deep-drawn sigh through all his frame
he died.
And his murderer stood by to see the shudder con-
vulse the rigid limbs, and count each lingering pang
calm, pitiless, unmoved, his face so serene in its chill
VOL. II. d
34 STBATHMORE.
indifference, its brutal and unnatural tranquillity,
whilst beneath the drooped lids, his eyes watched with
the dark glitter of a triumphant vengeance, the last
agony of the man whom he had loved, that the
two who were with him in this hour shrank in-
voluntarily from his side, awed more by the Living
than by the Dead. Almost unconsciously they
watched him, fascinated by a dumb horror, as he
stooped and severed a long flake of hair that was
soiled by the dank earth and wet with the dew ; un-
arrested they let him turn away with the golden lock f
in his hand and the fatal calm on his face, and move
to the spot where his horse was waiting. The beat of
the hoofs rang muffled on the turf, growing fainter
and fainter as the gallop receded. Strathmore rode to
her whose bidding had steeled his arm, and whose soft
embrace would be his reward; rode swift and hard,
with his hand closing fast on the promised pledge of
his vengeance, while behind him, in the shadows of
the falling night, lay the man whom he had once
loved, whom he had now slain, with the light of early
stars breaking pale and cold, to shine upon the oozing
blood as it trailed slowly in its death-stream through
the grasses, staining red the arid turf.
And the sun had gone down upon his wrath.
35
CHAPTER IV.
THE MESSAGE FROM THE DEAD.
The golden curl of the dead man's hair lay in her
lap, in pledge and proof that her bidding had been
done, that his revenge was taken; and she stooped
over her lover, this Messalina with her cheek of child-
like bloom, this Circe with her glance of gazelle-soft-
ness, and wreathed her white arms about him, and
leaned on his her fragrant lips. And he was happy !
ay, as the drunkard is in the reeling madness of his
revel, as the opium-eater is in the delirious insanities
of his excitation ; he was happy with this guilt at his
door, with this life on his soul, while the tresses of her
hair swept soft against his cheek, and the languor of
her eyes looked back into his own.
Remorse was not upon him, she, even as she was
his idol, became also his conscience and his God. His
D2
36 STRATHMORE.
honour had bent like a green withe in her hands, and
crime had no sting since it was just and sweet in her
sight.
The past hour left no trail of its horror, the death
summoned at his will followed him with no reproach ;
as he had been without mercy, so he was now without
remorse : the ghastly breath of the grave did not chill
him in the dreamy warmth of her kisses, and in his
heart the plague-spot of crime was not felt while it
beat upon hers. As a man after deep draughts of
strong wine has all memory dizzily drowned, but every
sense subtilely heated and roused, so the fierce pas-
sions of which he had drunk so deeply in one brief
twelve hours had dulled all conscience, and fanned his
blood to flame. For her sake, at her bidding, he had
steeped his soul in the guilt of mnrder ; and so much
the more deeply as it doomed him, so much the sweeter
grew his love. And the silken gold of the dead man's
hair lay there, wet and soiled with the night dews ;
and he, the Living, gave it no glance of pity, no
shudder of remorse, but looked up only to the eyes of
the enchantress, and only drew her rich lips closer to
his own.
What though a hell had yawned before him for
this deed? his heaven lay here in a woman's soft
embrace. What were God or man to him? she
smiled upon his sin.
"Strathmore!"
Low whispered, the name struck on his ear as he
THE MESSAGE FBOM THE DEAD, 37
passed the open window of a corridor leading back to
his own room, in the grey of the early dawn. The
casement looked upon the gardens, and in the faint
light he saw the figure of a man standing there
below.
"Strathmore!"
At the second whisper he turned towards the em-
brasure, and leaned out:
"Who are you ?"
"I hush!" said the speaker, in whom he now
recognised ErrolTs second. " Wake no one, or they
will wonder why I come like a thief in the twilight.
As I saw you pass the window, I thought it better to
call you than to rouse the house. I came to tell you
that to-night's affair may be. the subject of inquiry,
and that it would be wise for you to get out of
France."
"Pshaw! All I do I defend."
He spoke carelessly and contemptuously where he
leaned against the embrasure, looking down on the
speaker, who, although his adversary's second, had
been an acquaintance also of his own.
" As you choose, I only tell you. Sir Arthur has
rallied enough to be furious in his grief. For myself,
I shall go across the frontier. I have no fancy to
wait for the fracas."
" That will be as you please, but it cannot concern
me.
The other looked up at him in the light of the new-
risen sun, with something of that feeling, which had
38
nade him shrink from the aaa who bad stood with a
pitiless smile on hk lips, to watch the death throes
slacken and grow stilL He was a soldier, and thought
little of a life taken or spared, but enen he shuddered
at Strathmore's calm inliiference, whilst as jet hot
the .short space of one summer's night stretched be-
twixt so dark a tragedy and its author.
a Xo," he said, bluntly. "I believe you take no
concern save in what touches yourself! But Enroll
bade me, if he fell, give yon this ; it is all he left to
my charge save another for a woman in England."
He lifted his hand, standing on the stone coping,
and held up a letter. Strathmore stretched and took
it, and the other turned away, without more words,
and strode back across the lawn in the gloaming.
The sun had risen high enough for the writing to
be clear, and as his eyes fell on the superscription,
where he stood alone in the deserted corridor while all
around him slept, for the first time his own revenge
recoiled back on him ; he remembered how the life
which he had taken had once been perilled for his
own ; he remembered how this man had loved him!
The suddenness of this unlooked-for message from
the dead, awoke memories which staggered his merci-
less and immutable calm. He crushed the letter in
his hold unread, and, leaving the house, went out
into the dawn instead of going to his chamber; in
that moment he wished to shun even the gaze of hire-
lings in that moment, ere he read what the hand
THE MESSAGE FBOK THE DEAD. 39
now lifeless had written, he felt he must have about
him the fresh clear air of morning. Far,
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
The fatal shadows which walk by us still ;
and already the doom, wrought by his own sin, was
following in his trail.
He walked onward in the solemn stillness of that
early day, fresh from the lascivious sweetness of a
guilty love, and the furious delight of a brutal ven-
geance, walked onward through the warm white
mists of the morning, through silent solitudes of
woodland, crushing the packet in his grasp unread,
until the rapid rush of the river at his feet arresting
his course made him note whither he went. Then he
paused, and wrenched open the letter of the man who
had fallen by his hand.
And what he read was this :
" Your own act has made more words between
us impossible ; to a blow there can be but one answer.
But I write this in the hazard that in a few hours I
may have ceased to Kve ; when I am dead you may
hear without dishonour to me that you have wronged
me from first to last. Were it alone for the sake of
our past friendship, I would not let you go through
life holding me the liar and betrayer you now do ; it
were to debase and pollute all mankind, in my person,
and in your sight. What you believe I see plainly,
how you were duped to believe it I can conjecture
40 STRATHMOBE.
well enough ; it is sufficient that by your belief you
you do me the foulest wrong that ever a lie worked.
It is she who betrayed you, not I. I loved her true !
with that vile passion which levels us to brutes ; but,
before God, Strathmore, I write my oath to you
that to that love I never yielded; it was she who
tempted, I who resisted. In this must lie the root of
the revenge upon myself which she now takes in
goading and duping your jealousy, till you believe
you see in me a rival who would have treacherously
supplanted you. Last night, in warning you of Ma-
rion Vavasour's inconstancy, I spoke no slander as you
thought ; when you taunted me for proof, I could have
given it you on the word of one who, as you well know,
never lied. Only a few moments before I had been
alone with her, when the Due left, in the supper-room ;
alone, with no shield between my hateful passion, that
sprang up unawares, ripe as it was rank, and her own
loveliness, that lured me with glances, with smiles,
with hinted words, with every devilish divine tempta-
tion. . . . My God ! you know the snare you suc-
cumbed to it. Pity me, forgive me, if, for an instant,
I almost forgot all bonds of honour to you ; if, for an
instant, I fell so low as to remember nothing save that
her eyes wooed my love and confessed her own save,
that what I loathed while I coveted it, might be mine
at my will. Pity me, forgive me, you who know her
accursed sorceress beguilings, her subtle tempting that
lies in the languor of a glance, in the passing fragrance
of her hair ! My weakness endured but an instant ;
THE MESSAGE FROM THE DEAD. 41
then I broke from her while I had strength ; I left
her while the first whispers of love stole from her lips.
At the moment I encountered you; I strove to warn
yon of the worthlessness of the woman on whose love
yon staked your life and fool that I was ! when you
gibed and taunted me for proof, I shrank from striking
you the deadly blow; I chose rather to let you think
of me as you would, than force you to own the right
by which I spoke, since I must have bought my vindi-
cation at such cost to you. Early on the following
morning her page brought me a note from Lady Va-
vasour. I send it to you; it will serve to show you
how subtlety, how poetically, she shrouds her wanton
infidelities, this doublertraitress to her lovers and her
lord! I wrote her back words that she will never
pardon me. Suffice it, that they were such as stripped
her amours of their delicate gloss, to show them to her
in their own naked light ; such as refused her love for
your sake, and rebuked her treachery in your name
and my own. Out of her presence, and in the calm-
ness of morning, I had strength to do thus much in
the right path : God knows I have wandered from it
often enough ! This is the brief entire truth. My
lips never spoke a lie ; my hand would scarce write
one, when, for aught I know, I may be within an
hour of my death. I write it because I could not
endure that, throughout your life, you should hold my
memory tainted with such thrice-damned treachery as
you have attributed to me ; and it will spare, rather
than inflict on you, added pain, since sooner or later
42 STRATHMORE.
you must learn that this woman's passion has fled,
though her pride of dominion over you still lingers,
and you will suffer less to know it thus, than to track
it first in the rivalry, and triumph, of some living foe.
"Now let me make you one request in as few words
as I can ; for though, after what has passed, I should
compel you to meet me were you my brother by blood,
I still choose rather to ask this boon of you than of
any other. The young girl whom you once saw with
me in the elm-walk at White Ladies perhaps you
have forgot the circumstance was not my mistress,
as you naturally thought, but my wife. Three years
ago, we met by a strange accident, while I was staying
at your house, during your absence. She was the
daughter of an exiled Hungarian noble, who had taken
refuge near the abbey, in obscurity and poverty. She
was in the early grief of her father's recent loss, a
mere child in years, singularly lovely, and almost des-
titute. I loved, and I soon taught her to love. To
have offered her dishonour, in her trustful and de-
fenceless innocence, would have been dishonour. I
married her, but secretly, and have kept it secret even
from you, partly for entanglements, that you know
hampered me, partly because of my creditors, chiefly
because, as you are aware, the knowledge of such a
marriage would have ensured my certain disinherit-
ance by Sir Arthur. She has lived at White Ladies,
still under her father's name of de Vocqsal, and your
almost constant absence on the Continent prevented
your hearing whatever rumours might be afloat re-
THE MESSAGE FROM THE DEAD. 43
garding our connexion. She is very dear to me ; yet
I have but ill recompensed such love as she has borne
me. My death will leave Lucille and her child pen-
niless and unprotected ; what I would now ask of you
is, as far as may lie in your power, to shield her from
the bitterness she is so little fitted to brave. This,
then, is the trust I leave you, Strathmore ; you will
let her find in you a sure and faithful friend ; you
will make to her atonement for the wrong you have
done to me ; and if her child, now in its infancy, ever
live to womanhood, I would wish that in years to
come you should speak to her sometimes of her father,
but never let her become aware that it is by your hand
I fell. Should it be decreed that I die thus, I will not
say, ' Know no remorse/ for that were to wish you
devil, not man ; but I do say to you, believe this, that
neither now nor in the most abhorred hours that your
mad passion for the wanton adulteress who has parted
us, ever caused me, have I felt bitterness to you. ' I
would that it had been an open enemy who had done
me this dishonour, and not thou, my brother, my
guide, my own familiar friend ;' but since thus it
has chanced take my last words as you would take
the oath of a dying man. I forgive you fully all that
has already passed, all that may yet be to come. If I
die, remember it will be in peace with you.
" Bertie Erroll."
This was the message of the dead.
44 STRATHMOREL.
Standing in the morning light, whose reddening
sun-rays, streaming on the page, lit up each word till
it seemed written in blood, Stnthmore read read on
to the last line.
Then a shrill, hoarse err, shuddering rang through
all the forest silence, greeting the earfy day as it up-
rose the cry of a great agony and throwing his
arms above his head, he fell, like a drunken man,
down upon the sodden earth.
45
CHAPTER V.
" WHOSO HAS SOWN THE WHIRLWIND SHALL BE
REAPER OF THE STORM."
Marion Vavasour stood on the balcony of her
dressing-room looking down on the rose-gardens below,
and leaned her white arms upon the bronze scroll-
work, and let her Eastern cymar of snowy silk float
at will upon the summer wind, and with a sunny
laughter sweetly glancing in her eyes gazed at the
mists afar off, or downward to where her love-birds
were shaking the dew from their wings. Yonder,
beneath the roof that was within her sight, where the
early sun-rays played about the lips that were sealed
to silence, and the eyes which could never more open
to their light, lay the dead, slain at her whisper, to
sate her revenge ; yonder, under the forest-shadows,
whose outline she traced from her rose-hung balcony,
a living man wrestled with his agony, his soul tainted
with a murderer's guilt, because her kiss had moved
46 STRATHMORE.
him to its work, her word aroused him to its hell-born
passions. But the knowledge did not cast one shade
upon her brow, did not scare away for one brief hour
the smile that wantoned on her lips ; nay, the know-
ledge was dear to her, since it was proof and tribute to
her power. For in this dazzling delicate creature was
the cruelty of the beast of the desert.
The full light of the day, now fully risen for some
hours, bathed her in its warmth, whilst clusters of her
favourite flowers clung above and below her in their
perf umy profusion, till she seemed framed in roses ;
her floating dress showed all the voluptuous outline
of her form ; her rich hair lay lightly on her
shoulders, glancing in the sun; and thus, in her
proud loveliness, she was seen by the man she had
betrayed.
It had been better for her then that death had
stricken her in that hour. Woe as her beauty had
wrought for others, it had never worked deadlier de-
struction than that which it now brought herself.
Suddenly, between her and the sunlight, a shadow
feU.
She turned, with the gay challenge of her tri-
umphant smile, the silvery folds of her robes sweep-
ing the leaves of the roses till they fell in a fragrant
shower ; then, for the first time in her shadowless life,
the smile faded from off those laughing lips, and the
pallor of a ghastly terror blanched the rich bloom
from her face. She saw the man whom she had
THE REAPER OF THE STOEM. 47
fooled with the foul simulation of an undying love,
and whom her breath, with its traitorous caresses, had
wooed to the bottomless depths of crime. And she
saw that he knew her aright at last saw that there
are moments in human life which transform men to
fiends, leaving them no likeness of themselves; mo-
ments in which the bond slave, goaded to insanity,
turns and rends his tyrant.
With a spring like a bloodhound's, Strathmore
overleapt the barrier which parted them, and caught
her in his grasp, bruising the white skin which he had
once deemed too fair for the summer winds to breathe
on as they blew. And a deadly fear came on her, for
she knew that now her voice would have no power to
quell the tempest the voice which had lured him to
crime ! She knew that now her loveliness could have
no sway to bring him to her feet the loveliness which
was but one fell lie !
As the bloodhound seizes on its prey, his hand
crushed her there where she stood; his face was
haggard, his eyes were bloodshot, and alight with
lurid flame ; his hair wet and clotted with the damp
sweat of anguish ; his dress disordered, and stained
with the soil of the earth, and the dews of the morn-
ing. Few could have recognised him in the wreck
one crime had wrought one hour worked. In his
agony he was mad I speak it literally mad ; with
its hideous riot surging in his brain, and reeling
through his blood. And in the sunlight he saw the
mocking accursed loveliness, which, even as a fiend
48 STRATHMORE.
in angel guise, had drawn him on into an abyss
of infamy, and stained his soul with the curse of
fratricide.
He crushed her in his arms, bruising her white
bosom and her delicate limbs ; and his voice, which
had lost almost all human sound, broke out with a loud
hissing whisper :
" Traitress murderess ! I will have life for life !
It is the old Jew law God's ordinance ! "
Through the stillness of the summer morning his
laugh rang with horrible mirth, his soul, drunk with
one sin, was athirst for more athirst to trample
out this divine and devilish thing which he had wor-
shipped, down into the darkness of the tomb; to
avenge his own betrayal, and the betrayal of the dead,
on the woman who had trepanned both, with her
wanton's love, her serpent's cruelty. His hot breath
scorched her face ; his eyes, bright with the light of
insanity, glared into her own ; his hands twisted in the
shower of her shining hair, that golden web which
had meshed him in its toils ; he held her powerless to
break away from the worst that he might work, while
the fair hues of her face blanched white, and her
voice rose in a shriek of abject terror.
" Oh Heaven ! I shall die I shall die ! You
would not kill me, Strathmore ? "
Again, in its mirth, his laugh broke out ; he was
delirious in his agony.
"Why not? Why not, if devils can diet You
THE BEAPER OF THE STORM. 49
have done murderer's work, you shall have a mur-
derer's doom ! "
Held in his grip, she could not free herself;
clenched there as in a vice of iron, she could not
escape from whatsoever he might mete out to her, and
in his maddened cheated love, his felon guilt, his tor-
tures of remorse, he knew not what he did ; he was
brutal and conscienceless as any beast of prey raven-
ing for blood. He only saw, in the burning glare of
the mocking sunlight, the beauty which had betrayed
him; he only felt the forest-brute's fierce craving
thirst for life. And she knew that she was in his
power ; she knew that her slave was now her master.
Sickening with terror, trembling, quivering, stifled,
she wrestled in his grasp, while her voice moaned out
a piteous cry :
"Oh, Strathmore! My God! have mercy,
mercy ! "
Closer and closer he clenched her in his anguish, her
amber hair tangled in his arms, her form pressed in
his hold until she moaned with pain, while his laugh
rang out again, like Damien's in the torture of the
"I will give you such mercy as you gave: no
other!"
And she knew that death was nigh her now
death from the hands of the man she had fooled, and
goaded, and betrayed ; in his iron strength her deli-
cate frame was frail as flax which the winds can break
in twain, and as helpless to his will. One pressure of
VOL. II. e
50 STRATHMORE.
his fingers on her throat, and its breath would be stilled
for ever ; one blow from his hand upon her fair veined
temples, and the death she had meted out would be
her portion.
With all the preternatural strength which is be-
gotten from a ghastly terror, she wrestled and panted
in his hold, as the bird in the hand of the snarer ; as
easily might she have sought to escape from a vice of
steel that had locked her in its jaws, as seek to wrench
herself free from the deadly grip of the man whose
outraged love made him a fiend, whose vain remorse
made him a madman.
A sickness of mental fear came over her ; a mist
blinded her eyes, shutting out the light of day ; a loud
noise surged in her ear, and beat about her brain.
He only saw in the glaring sun-rays the face which
he had worshipped the face which had lured him to
his sin ; he only knew but one brute impulse to crush
and trample out this loveliness, where never more
could it reproach him where nevermore could others
gaze upon, and rejoice in, it. She was dying dying
by his hand ! without power to summon all those who
lay within her call ; without strength to break from
him to where safety, succour, defence were all close,
only parted from her by the velvet hangings of
her door! There, without, lay the sunny peopled
earth ; here, nigh at hand, was the household which
obeyed her lightest word : yet, powerless, voiceless,
imprisoned in his grip, she must die, without a sign,
THE REAPER OF THE STORM. 51
without a cry, like the fawn which is choked by the
hound's death-grapple !
And her eyes gazed up to him with a wild appeal-
ing pain ; that look smote his strength like a sudden
blow. He had seen it when the sun had set, in the
sightless eyes of the dead.
His frame shivered, his limbs grew powerless, his
sinews paralysed, his nerves stricken strengthless ;
he threw her from him with a sudden cry, hurling her
fragile form from his arms, as the winds hurl a broken
flower from out their path.
"Death is too much mercy for you! You shall
live to suffer "
And, leaving her where she lay in her bruised and
quivering loveliness, Strathmore reeled out into the
scorching sunlight, that seemed to glare upon his
sight and scathe his brow like fire reeled, stagger-
ing like a drunken man, his eyes blind, his reason
giddy, with the horrible riot of threatening delirium.
For on his soul was the curse of ,Cain.
Marion Vavasour told none of that hour of jeopardy.
When he hurled her from him she fell insensible, and
her attendants, finding her thus, deemed it a swoon
or syncope, and she let the error pass, undisputed.
Too much was intertwined with that horrible conflict
for her lips to be those which unfolded its story. And
on the morrow, when she lay on her delicate couch
shrouded in laces, and silks, and cashmeres, her eyes
e2
52 STBATHMOEE.
bat the lovelier for the dark circle beneath them, her
face bat the fairer for its fragile whiteness and the
languor of indisposition, Monseigneur le Dae d'Etoiles
and Monsignore VillAflor, admitted to her cabinet de
toilette, thought they had never beheld her more
divine in her most dazzling moments, than in this
illness, which she allowed that the tragedy in which
her name was involved, had brought on her through
its shock and its terror.
" Cecil Strathmore has killed his friend, you know ?
It is fearful it is terrible ! It has shattered all my
nerves," she said, with a delicate shiver of terror, to
the prince and the bishop. " That horrible story !
do not talk of it any more, I beseech you I entreat
you, sire. Poor Cecil! My lord always said he
would commit some crime or other some day. They
quarrelled about me, you say perhaps ! But it was
bien bete if they did. And poor Bertie Erroll was so
handsome ! It is such a pity that the Strathmores'
passions were always dangerous ! "
And Marion Vavasour sighed, and shuddered again
with that delicate tressaillement, and stirred her choco-
late, and stroked the snowy curls of her lion-dog, and
languidly tossed some perfume over her jewelled
fingers, and asked what they thought of Scribe's new
comedy and George Sand's fresh novel ; while Mon-
seigneur and Monsignore each alike congratulated
himself that her long unbroken liaison was evidently
snapped asunder with this Bois scandal, of which all
THE BEAPEE OF THE STOEM. 53
Paris was talking, and that its rupture had left a fair
field open to all new aspirants.
Eemorse was not in her ; she knew it not ; and she
was well content that Paris should have nothing else
to discourse of, before midnight in the Salons, and
after midnight in the Cercles, but this tragedy in the
Deer Park, whose fatal end was but sign and seal of
her power. Two countries babbled of that Helen-like
beauty which drove men to madness
as when through ripen'd corn,
By driving winds, the crackling flames are borne.
What mattered it at what price her superb triumphs
were won ?
It was but once or twice in solitude that, remem-
bering, with the icy dread of its awful danger shiver-
ing afresh through all her veins, the peril of the death
which had so nigh encompassed her, she heard again
hissing in her ear, with its ghastly laugh, that menace
of the future : " Death is too much mercy for you !
You shall live to suffer ! " It was only then that,
vaguely and with a nameless dread, Marion Vavasour,
in her glad and glorious omnipotence, feared, with
prescient terror, that law inexorable which has written,
"Whoso sows the whirlwind, shall be reaper of the
storm ! "
54
CHAPTER VI.
DIES IR.
The fall sweet light of the summer day fell into
the chamber of the dead, where they had lain him
down and left him, in the deep stillness that no footfall
stirred, no voice disturbed, and no love watched, save
that of a little spaniel which had crept into his breast
and flew at those who sought to move her from her
vigil, and crouched there trembling and moaning
piteously.
The sun of another day had risen, waking the earth
to its toil and the children to their play ; lifting the
drooped bells of the closed flowers, and rousing the
butterfly to flutter in the light ; giving back to the
birds their song, to the waters their sparkle, to the
blue seas their laughing gleam; bringing to all the
world its resurrection from the silence and the gloom
of night. But here where the sun fell, touching his
cheek to warmth, his hair to gold, it had no spell to
DIES IRM. 55
waken: life was left to the insect stirring in the
grasses, to the leaf flickering in the wind, to the
spider weaving in the sunshine, but life was robbed
from him !
Through the long day the light found its way into
the darkened room, and wandered lovingly about the
limbs, with their siJferb and stately stature, which lay
powerless and stricken; and about the face, with, its
rich, woman-like beauty, where the fair, luxuriant
hair was clotted and soiled with the black trail of
blood; and where the grey hue of that Corruption
which knows no pity in its theft, no mercy in its
march, already was stealing on its ghastly way.
The day was nigh its close when the hired watcher,
dully sleeping at his post, started in affright as a voice
fell on his ear :
" Let me pass ! "
"Pass? Not there!"
"Yes there."
At the reply the man looked up to scan the stranger
who sought to enter the chamber of the. dead; and
as he saw his face, although it was wholly unfamiliar
to him, shuddered at the look it wore, and at the light
that glittered in the eyes.
Why why?" he faltered. "What claim have
you ? Who are you ? "
" I am his murderer ! Stand by I "
And at the hideous calmness of the answer the man
involuntarily sickened and shuddered and fell back ;
and an iron grasp thrust him aside like a cowering
56 8TRATHM0RE.
dog, and closed the door upon him and barred him
out.
Strathmore was alone with the dead.
And he stood by him, even as in the virgin years of
the young world the First Murderer stood beside the
brother whom he had slaughteifid in his fair and
gracious manhood, because the seething madness and
the brutal hate of jealousy and vengeanee had made
a ghastly crime seem sweet and holy in his sight. The
sin of Cain was on his soul and even as Cain heard
in the awful silence the voice of God calling on him
for the life that he had hurled from earth, so he heard
it now, as in his agony he shrieked aloud to the dead
to waken, and free him from his curse ! to arise and
live again, so that he should not bear this doom
through life and through eternity! And his own
voice, as it echoed back upon the stillness, left silence
as the mocking answer of his prayer, that silence
which must for ever stretch betwixt the dead and
him.
He shuddered in the sujtry warmth of day, like one
who shivers in dank, icy waters ; and stood looking
down upon the white, serene face, and the hair that
was blackened with blood, looking, with the dulled,
paralysed stupor of remorse.
This man had loved him, had suffered for him, had
borne with sacrifice and wrong for his sake, had
cleaved to him closer than a brother, and he had
slaughtered him as we slaughter a brute !
DIES IRE. 57
Yesterday living, in all the fulness, the strength,
the beauty, the rich rejoicing glory of his manhood,
and to-day dead dead ! carrion that lay sightless to
the sunshine, senseless to all sound, powerless to lift
his hand against the feeblest insect that should begin
the fell work of the tomb, useless save to be thrust
away by hasty hands out of the remembrance of men
into the dark and brutal silence of the grave.
Standing there beside him, a terror, such as falls
upon men in their own death-hour, when every for-
gotten sin stands out to 'damn them, fell upon his
murderer; rending asunder the iron of a pitiless
nature; striking to dust, as the lightning shivers
steel, the unyielding strength which had refused to
know remorse, and had gazed with a chill smile upon
the agonies of death : smiting down upon his knees,
as with the wrath of God, the mortal whose passions
had usurped God's judgment and forestalled God's
summons, who had dared to mete out life and death
as though he were not Man but Deity.
Now for the first hour he realised what he had
done : and struck by it as by a blow, he staggered
and fell, his head bowed, his arms stretched out, the
dews of a mortal anguish thick upon his brow, his brain
on fire with the horrible surging of the blood, that
like a pent-up flood, seemed bursting to break from
bondage.
Suddenly in that dread silence where he knelt
beside the bier, there arose, joyous and melodious,
the evening song of the birds without, where they
58 STRATHMORE.
fluttered amidst the ilex leaves ; and the tender sound
struck on his ear as a knife strikes upon bare quiver-
ing nerves. In those frail things, born for a summer's
span, which could be crushed by a young child's feeble
grasp, the great mystery of Life was left ; and here
here his hand had shattered it for ever ! A lifetime
of remorse could not restore what he had destroyed,
and trampled out, in the brute fury of one crime. ,
That sound broke his stupor, and saved him from
madness ; his chest rose and fell as though heaving
against bands of steel; the blood beat and surged
about his brain ; the iron of his nature broken asunder,
yielded and gave way, and one deep gasping sob
quivered in the air as he sank forward, calling in his
blind agony on the name of the dead.
There, beside the man whom he had loved and
murdered, they found him when, far towards the
night, they broke open the barred door found him
lying senseless.
For two months the wise men who gathered about
his bed because he had gold and rank, and sought to
drive away the retribution which followed a fell crime,
with the poor miserable herbs and poisons that their
pharmacopoeia taught them, held his life in danger,
and called his peril by a lengthy name.
More briefly, it was still but the mad beating of
the imprisoned blood, which, like the waves of a sea,
flooded all the chambers of the mind, already filled
with distorted thoughts and abhorred sounds, the off-
DIES IKJE. 59
spring, not of the fantasia of delirium, but worse
of the memories of guilt. Worse ; for the madman,
or the fever-stricken, made sane, leaving his bed,
leaves far behind him all which turned it into hell ;
but when the lurking fire in Strathmore's blood had,
flame-like, of itself burned down into exhaustion (or,
as the wise men better loved to phrase it, when " they
had cured him"), with him arose every dread shape
that had made night horrible and day sickly; and
with him they passed out into the world, and mingled
with the things of daily life, and followed him deny-
ing him solitude, forbidding him rest. In those awful
hours when but one of two issues had seemed inevit-
able for him insanity or death 4hese had been ever
before him ; the Sorceress, with the wanton glamour
of her divine loveliness, whose kiss seemed ever scorch-
ing on his lips, whose laugh seemed ever mocking on
his ear; and the Dead whom he had slaughtered at
her bidding, whose dying sigh quivered for ever on
the air, and whose face, with the eyes wide open to
the light, with their last look of wild appealing pain,
for ever was before him.
When he arose and went forth again amongst men,
with what seemed to the world, which had thrilled
with the horror of his story, an unaltered bearing, an
unnatural negligence and calm, these were with him
still spectres of the passion which had betrayed him,
of the crime with which his soul was stained. Before
the tribunal of God, in the horrors of night and soli-
tude, when none were by to stand between him and
GO STRATHMOBE.
the sin which made his conscience its own hell, be-
tween him and the anguish which rioted still for this
woman's lost loveliness, his chastisement grew more
ghastly with every day which dawned, with every
hour that passed. It was like the chastisement of
Orestes, followed by those dread shapes which tracked
him through his doom, and lay beside him even on
the threshold of the altar of God, watching him while
he slept, so that his sleep was peaceless; while he
waked, so that his day was joyless ; while he prayed,
so that his prayer was fruitless those Eumenides
which are but type and figure of the Passions.
There are natures which in their anguish seek the
fellowship of their kind, as a wounded deer* will seek
his herd; there are others which shun it, as the
stricken eagle soars aloft to die alone, howsoever the
blood be dropping from his broken wings. Strath-
more's nature, proud, tenacious, unyielding as iron,
was the last. Pitiless himself, he abhorred pity, and
if he yielded little mercy to misery, he asked none for
his own. Therefore the world, when he rose from his
bed and entered it once more, marvelled at his heart-
lessness, and deemed him unchanged, untouched.
So the world, great liar though it be, is oftentimes
deceived !
Unchanged ! if the iron that has passed through
the fire be unchanged after the furnace which has
molten it in its scorch till it has bent like a river reed,
then was he so : not else. All that was evil in him
had leaped up like a lion from his lair, and now could
DIES IRE. 61
never more be drugged to sleep ; all of softness which
his guilty love had lent his nature had been swept
aside in the whirlwind, and its pitiless strength had
centred in but one purpose, one desire, one craving :
that of vengeance. For his character was one of
those in which cruelty is twin-born with suffering, and
which, having tasted of crime as the tiger blood, seeks
more, and blots out sin by sin. His curse had been
born of his vengeance ; yet to crush out his agony he
craved vengeance yet again. For this man, who had
held himself his own god to mould his destiny at will,
who had deemed he ruled his desires under iron curb,
and who had looked on in cold disdain while others
suffered or rejoiced, indifferent to joy as he was steeled
to pain, endured tortures such as weaker, gentler na-
tures never know let them thank Heaven for their
exemption ! However guilty and born of the senses
his love had been, he had worshipped to devotion the
woman who had betrayed him; the very air she
breathed had been sacred to him ; he had loved her
with passionate truth ; he had been jealous of the very
winds that played amongst her hair ; he would have
staked his life upon her fidelity, even as he did stake
his honour and his peace. What marvel that now
"the hate wherewith he hated her was yet greater
than the love wherewith he had loved her?" Her
hand had hurled him into an abyss of guilt ; her kiss
had breathed upon his lips a curse that must for eyer
lie there ; her tempting had allured and betrayed him
into crime, which however the law and the world
62 STBATHMOBE.
freed him from all stain, marked him out for ever in
his own sight and in the sight of tmth a murderer.
And go where he would his curse pursued him.
In the watches of night it wakened him, and he cried
out in its agony with the cold sweat dank upon his
brow. In the chill dawn it uprose with him, till the
light of day looked hideous, and made him turn from
it as from the gaze of an accusing angel. Passing the
open doors of church or cathedral it pursued him, for
the hot sun seemed streaming down upon the written
Law which guards the sanctity of life, and forbids its
golden cord to be cut asunder by the hand of man.
Amidst the peopled world it haunted him, till the
purple wine in his glass looked red with blood, and
through the riotous laughter of brilliant revel he heard
ever in his ear the piteous shiver of one dying sigh.
In the gay glare of gaslight, or in the grey shadows of
the twilight, in the rush of crowds or in the stillness
of his chamber, he saw the face of the dead ; he saw
the shudder of the laboured breath, the anguish of the
death-spasm, the life-blood winding slowly, slowly, in
its dark and slimy trail amidst the grasses, and soaking
the fair and trailing hair. Like Cain's had been his
crime; like Cain's was now his chastisement. And
the brand burned not the less, but the more, upon his
soul because it was not written on his brow for men
to read.
63
CHAPTER VH.
REQUIEM JETEENAM.
It was a damp, yellow autumn night, with the
melancholy sighing of winds through the dense
Druidic woods, and white Yapours rising from the
meres and estuaries to sweep chillily across the sward,
A profound silence reigned over White Ladies a
silence in which the " calling of the sea" could be
heard from afar off, where the Western Ocean washed
its time-worn reefs, and each fall of the yet green
leaves trembled audibly through the stillness. And in -
this silence, complete as that of mountain solitudes^
save for the moaning murmur of the restless seas and
the weary lulling of the winds as they swept through
the pathless forests, a man on foot, and alone, took his
way through the woods on an errand that it is rarely
given to mortals to fulfil : he went to atone to the
Living for a wrong to the Dead. Fool !
We can destroy, but we cannot restore ; and the
64 STRATHMOBE.
soul may labour futilely through the length of weary
years, to upbuild, what one brief hour of its passions
has sufficed to shatter into dust. Sin ever comes
obedient to man's bidding; Expiation, fugitive and
fleeting, mocking him, eludes his grasp.
He walked through the gloom of the descending
night, with the pale skies above him, and in his hand
the dead man's letter. It seemed to him that that
which he must say to the one whom he had widowed
in her youth would be better said beneath the shroud
of night than in the garish day. He went on alone,
while at intervals a water-bird started at his step, and
the hoot of an owl pierced the silence ; went on till he
reached the dwelling to which they had directed him,
where it stood shut away by forest trees from the
lonely road. No living thing was near ; the faint bark
of a dog baying in the distance the only sound which
broke upon the night, while the moon shone fitfully
on the dark rustic porch and the lozenge-shaped panes
of the casements. The door was slightly open, and
since no one answered to his summons, he thrust it
farther back and entered ; the house seemed empty.
There was no light save that of the moon's rays as
they strayed in, and of a dim lamp burning above the
staircase : the rooms on either side the entrance were
deserted, though they bore the trace of recent occu-
pance, and in one, as the moonbeams fell upon it, he
saw the outline of an easel, and the white pages of a
book open upon a music-stand. The house appeared
forsaken, and he went slowly onward up the stairs,
KEQUIEM 2ETEBNAM. 65
guided by the little oil-lamp that swung there, and
bending his head to avoid the beams of the low ceil-
ing. In a chamber to his left, as he mounted the
staircase, he saw the glimmer of light, and followed
it ; he thought he had mistaken the dwelling, and here
might find some who would direct him aright, for
he knew but little of the by-roads and homesteads
about.
He paused on the threshold of the bed-chamber,
and struck lightly on the panels of the door ; it was
opened by a woman, who looked up at him alarmed
and* curious at the first moment, then dropped him a
lowly reverence as she recognised the lord of the
manor.
Strathmore uncovered his head and slightly ad-
vanced.
"I am Lord Cecil Strathmore. Can I see your
mistress ? "
She hesitated, and looked uncertain.
" I suppose so, my lord if so be as you wish "
" I desire to see her, now."
. The woman noticed that his voice was hoarse, and
seemed to tremble slightly, and, in obedience rather to
that sign than to his desire, or his rank, fell back to
let him pass into the room.
"Will you walk hither, then, if you please, my
lord?"
"Here?"
He followed her, wondering at the place chosen,
into the dimly lit bedchamber, that to him looked as
VOL. II. p
66 STBATHMOBE.
deserted as the rest of the dwelling. The woman
preceded him, herself strangely silent and subdued,
and drawing aside the muslin curtains of a bed which
stood, in foreign mode, in an alcove, motioned him
there, without a word, to her side.
At the gesture he paused involuntarily.
"Good God! is she ill?"
The servant looked at him surprised, and her voice
sank to a whisper :
"Dl? I thought your lordship knew she died at
dawn to-day ? "
"DM!"
The word rattled in his throat, he staggered back
against the wall, and leaned there, his face covered,
his breath thick and laboured: another life lay heavy
on his soul !
u A few weeks ago, my lord," went on the woman,
while her voice faltered and grew thick with tears, u a
letter came from Paris leastways, it was that post-
mark with a strange writing on the envelope, and
inside of it another letter from Major ErrolL Made-
moiselle Lucille read the note from my master first,
and as she read her face grew scared and awful, with
a piteous look in her eyes, like a lamb's they're lead-
ing to slaughter. She seized the letter it had come
in, and her eyes had scarce fell on it before she gave
a cry like a death-cry, my lord, and sunk down, all
cold and senseless and crouched together."
The woman's voice stopped with a low gasping sob.
u We did all we could, my lord indeed we did ;
requiem: jeteknam. 67
but the minute the doctor see her, he said as there
was no hope ; that a sudden shock had shattered her
brain, and that the cruelest thing to wish for her was
life. Oh, my lord ! and so young as she was ! She
never knew any one of us again, not even the child,
but lay there, weeks through, with no sense or sight
in her beautiful eyes. She sank slowly of sheer ex-
haustion, fading off like a flower. And, at length, at
sunrise this morning she died. I suppose your lord-
ship will know what has chanced to my master ? His
letter that she held clenched in her hand, the doctor
took and locked up with other papers, but that in the
strange handwriting was left, and I made bold to read
it It came from a gentleman, who wrote that Major
Erroll had been shot in some duel at Paris, and had
bade him as wrote it enclose that letter to Mademoi-
selle Lucille if he fell. I know nothing else, my lord ;
I only know that the news killed my mistress/'
She ceased ; and each of her homely words struck
like steel to the heart of her hearer, staining his soul
with the guilt of two lives blotted out by his hand
from the Living.
Dead!
Had he known her and loved her well, the word
could scarce have echoed more hideously in his ears
than now, when it met him on the threshold mocking
the atonement that be came to offer, and striking
paralysed and powerless the soul which, in its pre-
sumption, had thought to strike the balance with its
sin, and cover crime by costless expiation. Dead !
f2
68 STRATHMOBE.
He leaned against the wall, with his head bowed in
silence ; the direst agony that racks men in their hours
of bereavement was mercy to the remorse that Strath-
more knew.
Then he raised his head slowly and moved towards
the couch, whilst the woman turned away so that she
did not look upon his face ; she, who only had heard
of his close friendship with the dead man, thought he
was moved by grief at his friend's loss, and his rank
made his sorrow sacred and unapproachable in her
eyes. He drew near the bed, impelled by some re-
sistless impulse to look on the work that he had
wrought, urged by that strange self-chastisement
which forces us to drink to the uttermost dregs from
the cup of retribution. The pale lamp-light fell on
the white and delicate couch, fit bier and pall for the
early youth thus early smitten to the tomb, and on the
bed she lay dead in the opening summer of her life
dead like a lily rudely broken in its bloom. The
love faithful in life was faithful unto death ; she had
gone to rejoin her husband !
The lifeless form lay there in its ethereal and
solemn loveliness, her hands lightly folded on her
breast, her eyes closed as though in slumber, bearing
no sign of the destroying hand, save in the hue that
blanched the lips, on which, even now, a sigh seemed
set, a voiceless prayer suspended. And in strange
contrast with her mother's mournful and motionless
repose, her head pillowed on the heart that had no
throb for her, her brow resting on the arm that gave
KEQUIEM JSTEENAM. 69
her no embrace, her breath leaving its fresh warmth
on the lips that answered her by no caress, was a young
child sleeping. Life in its earliest bud, side by side
with Life stricken in its fullest bloom ; the light gold
locks mingling with the dark unbound waves of her
mother's hair, the flushed cheek, with its rose-leaf
hue, lying against the one now colourless and cold,
the soft and dreamless sleep of childhood beside the
chill and hopeless slumber of the tomb.
" The child would not leave her, my lord," whispered
the woman. " She sobbed herself to sleep there trying
to waken her mother, and I had not the heart to stir
her. Poor orphan ! she is but an infant ; scarcely two
years old, and a love child! What will become of
'her!"
" Her future shall be my care."
His voice sounded dull and hoarse in his own ear as
he answered the brief words; standing there, the
vanity and the mockery of the atonement he had come
to offer seemed to rise, and jibe and gibber in his face
before the holy hush of death ; and the hand of God
seemed stretched to sever him from those whom he
had slain, and bid him stand aloof, alone on earth,
with no companion save his crime.
He was too late !
Too late !
The words seemed wailing through the air the
eternal requiem of every sin ; and as he stood there,
with his head bowed in the faint lamplight of the
chamber of death, the young child, waking from her
70 STEATHMOHE.
sleepy stirred as from some joyous dream, and pushed
her fair hair from her eyes, and laughed up in inno-
cence and gladness in his face. With an involuntary
gesture he spurned her from him as though some ac-
cursed thing had crossed his vision : her lips wore
her father's smile.
Stricken by that look as by the sword of an avenging
angel, he turned and went out into the silent night ;
and in his ear the ceaseless moaning of the distant
seas, and the weary cry of the winds, wandering and
without rest, followed in his path with one eternal
wail" Too late ! Too late ! "
71
CHAPTEK Vin.
" GOOD AND EVIL AS TWO TWINS CLEAVING
TOGETHEB."
u You drink the bitterness of Remorse ? Taste the
sweetness of Revenge."
The words stole softly to his ear in the stillness as
he paced down the ruined cloisters of the Abbey,
breaking in on the far-off lulling of the seas and
the hoot of the night-birds near. They pierced so
strangely to the secret of his thoughts, broke in so
suddenly on the solitude, in which no living thing
was near him, that he started and looked up with, for
one instant, what in a weaker man might have been
akin to superstition. The fitful moonlight, slanting
greyly in through the low pointed arches, fell across
the figure of a woman leaning against the moss-grown
pillar of the cloister-side; and in the dress, worn
something as Arabs wear their garments, with the
vivid colours which marked her tribe, and in the pro-
72 STRATHMOBE.
found melancholy of the Sclavonian features, he re-
cognised the Bohemian Redempta, who thus crossed
his path for the third time like some fixed recurrent
fate.
His steps were involuntarily arrested, and he
paused, looking at her in the moonlight, whilst her
gaze steadily met his, without boldness yet without
fear, with something compassionate in its mournful
fixity; and as she moved forward where a brighter
streak of the moon-rays fell, he saw that the olive-
bronze of her cheek had paled, and that her deep-set
eyes were lit with a luminous gleam.
"Well!" she said, slowly, "does the kiss burn
like poison now? Was sin born of the love, and a
crime of the sin, and a bitter curse of the crime f
Were the words of Redempta aright ? "
He flung her out of his path with unconscious
violence ; the passions that were at work within him
made this mocking travesty of them seem scarce so
much insult as jibe.
" Out of my way, woman devil whichever you
are!"
" More devil than woman, for, like you, I hate ! "
The answer came slowly and bitterly from her lips
with menacing meaning ; the ferocity of his grasp and
his words seemed to have swept unnoticed, over her,
and to have stirred her no more than the sweep of the
forest wind past her cheek. Her intonation caught
his ear, and he turned and looked more closely at her
features, on which were written the dark passions of
" GOOD AND EVIL CLEAVING TOGETHEB." 73
the Sclavonic character, masked by that melancholy
composure natural to the Eastern blood which mingled
in her veins. He saw that this woman's words were
not the offspring of charlatanry if they might be those
of a maniac's wanderings, and he paused, instinctively
drawn by the fate which seemed to have interwoven
her knowledge and her actions with his own.
Of that moment's pause she seized advantage, and
leaned towards him, changing her slow and imperfect
English for her own swift, mellow Ozeschen.
" Listen ! You are an English noble, rich and full
of power I a wandering Czec, whom your laws call
a tramp and your scorn calls a vagrant, and yet yet
listen ! I, the daughter of Phara, the gipsy, can
give you what your wealth cannot buy nor your
power command I can give you your vengeance ! "
By the faint yellow light she saw in his eyes rise
the steel-like glitter of his dangerous wrath as he
thrust her back.
"You are mad, or an impostor! Let me pass,
woman ! I am in no mood for fooling ! "
A smile bitter as his own crossed her face, and she
did not move from his path.
" Am I ? Look in my face and see ! Listen first,
my lord, ere you judge ! If the words of Kedempta
were error that she spoke to you long ago in Bohemia,
then say she speaks falsely now ; if you did not find,
as she foretold to you a brief while since in France,
that your love, changed to hatred, will know no rest
for its throes till it is slaked in revenge, then believe
74 STRATHMORE.
that she lies to yon now. Bnt if yon fonnd these
things true, then jndge her by them : as true is her
hatred for her whom yon hate, as sure is her power to
point yon your vengeance. Say ! were they truth or
error? Say!"
She waited for his answer, and he was silent, where
she stood fronting him in the dim moonlight of the
ruined cloister; a bitter wrath was in his eyes, a
haughty menace on his lips, but the melodious ap-
pealing voice of the Bohemian carried its own convic-
tion, and in a measure disarmed his anger ; her words
struck too closely home to the curse he bore within
him to be heard idly or with scorn, and the soul of
this man, in whom much that was great commingled
with dark and evil crimes, was too instinctively true to
itself and to others to sully itself by a lie even to a
beggar. She saw the advantage gained, and pursued
it, her voice growing swifter, and sunk to a whisper,
whilst the untutored poetry of her natural speech lent
dignity, almost solemnity, to the Bohemian tongue in
which she spoke.
"They were truth! and you have known their
bitterness. Listen, then ! 1 have followed you here
to your own country to be heard, for what you vainly
seek I can point out, what I vainly crave you can
work. Listen ! The worm burrows, where the tiger
cannot reach; the tiger tears and rends to death,
where the worm would be trampled and crushed
under foot ; let them both work together ! Will you
hold your revenge in your own grasp, to let its blow
" GOOD AND EVIL CLEAVING TOGETHEB." 75
fall, slowly, sorely, sharply, at what hour you will?
will you shatter the jewels from her breast, the smile
from her lips, the laughter from her eyes, the world
from her feet ? will you hold her fate in your grip,
meting it out at your will, crushing all that wanton
loveliness which has betrayed you, as you might crush
this velvet-painted moth in your hand? If you will,
then, my lord, listen to the words of Kedempta, who,
though ahungered and athirst, a wanderer on the earth,
without home or people, poor, and stricken, and deso-
late, will ask no reward of you save one one ! to see
her suffer! "
Her voice sank lower and lower, stealing out in the
hushed night with a terrible and ghastly meaning;
her hand clenched unconsciously upon his arm, her
eyes gleamed with a lurid thirsty light, and the im-
mutable and melancholy calm that veiled her features,
as it veils the faces of the Easterns beneath the throes
of strong emotion, only lent but a more deadly
strength to the last words than the wildest curse of
passion could have carried with them. To doubt her
was no longer possible ; and he answered her nothing
where they stood in the sickly autumn moonlight, the
air around them filled with the faint and mournful
soughing of the sea, and the lull of the winds among
the cloisters of the dead Dominicans.
u To see her suffer! "
It was the lust of his own soul this merciless and
brutal longing to draw within his grasp the vile and
lovely thing who had been his madness and his curse,
76 STRATHMORE.
and watch his vengeance work, and fester, and eat its
way into her very soul, whilst he stood calmly by, as
men in ancient days stood to watch the lovely limbs
of women stretched and broken on the rack. For
Strathmore, who had been born pitiless, had now
become cruel.
The Bohemian was silent also ; she seemed to have
lost all memory of his presence or her errand ; and
where she leaned against the broken archway, her
eyes were vaguely looking onward into the darkening
night, and as her hands moved unconsciously over
her chain of Egyptian berries, her lips muttered
still:
" Thou knowest how I have toiled to keep my oath.
Grant me but this but this ! To see her suffer ere
I die suffer as she made thee. Vengeance is
righteous ! "
A smile more evil than the worst curse that ever
lodged on human lips, came upon Strathmore's face
where the watery light of the moon fell on it. Having
tasted guilt, he had ceased to abhor guilt ; racked by
remorse, he still longed for added crime, and the fires
that scathed his soul neither chastened nor purged,
but only burned what was iron into steel.
"Kighteous?" he echoed, while his voice was
laboured with the passions roused by this woman's
tempting, but suppressed by her presence. " No !
it is hellish ! But what matter? it is all that is left
now ! Answer me, impostor or devil, whichever you
be why do you hate? "
" GOOD AND EVIL CLEAVING TOGETHER." 77
A weary smile, haggard as grief, crossed her lips
for one moment, and a strange softness trembled over
all her face.
Why, why ! " she cried, while the melancholy
Ozeschen words rose plaintively upon the silence.
" Why do women ever hate, sorrow, travail, rejoice,
lament ? Because they love ! I loved I the
vagrant, the gipsy, the fortune-teller, whom delicate
women shrink from as from pollution, loved, what she
the aristocrat, the courted darling, the beauty of
courts robbed from me. I loved oh God! it is
not of the past I love still ! my beloved, my be-
loved!"
Her head drooped upon her breast with a low
gasping sob, and her form trembled as though she
shivered at the wind ; then she threw back her head
and stood erect with her stag-like gesture, the light
glittering flame-like in her eyes, the dark blood burn-
ing flame-like on her brow.
" We met in Galicia. He was an Austrian soldier,
a noble like yourself, and he found beauty in me, and
I loved him, as the chill, pampered, luxurious women
of his world never love. I was his toy, but he he
was my god ! What others called my shame, was my
glory ; what others held my sin, was my crown ; and
I said in my soul, ' I have lived enough, since I have
lived to be thus dear to him.' I quitted my tribe to
become his mistress ; and when Lennartson left the
province, and went to Vienna, I followed him and
he loved me still, though where he once gave me days,
78 STRATHMORE.
he gave me hours. And when he went to Southern
France, I forgot my people and my country, and fol-
lowed him still thither and still he loved me, though
where he once gave me hours, he gave me moments.
It is ever so with men's love ! And there he saw her.
By night, as I crouched under the myrtle shrubs of
her villa to see his shadow, where it fell, I saw him in
her gardens ; by day, hidden under the pines, watch-
ing for his horse's gallop, I saw them riding together.
She beguiled him as she beguiled you ; he loved her,
and he was lost to me for ever ! For a while, I know
scarcely how long, time was a blank to me. I re-
member nothing ; people who tended me said after-
wards that I went mad it may have been so. The
first thing I remember is, when I crawled out and
found my way to his house, there was a crowd about
a crowd whispering and awe-stricken ; and when I
pushed my way through them, I saw him *
A shiver ran through her frame, and her voice
dropped; she waited one instant, then summoned
back the proud and mournful calmness with which
she spoke :
" I saw him, dead, shot by his own hand ....
and those about him were saying how she had laughed
and taunted him the night before, and how, maddened
by her, he had left her presence and ended the life
that she had made worthless. She had slain him !
and when they told her she felt no remorse for her
work, but went to a ball in her diamonds and her
loveliness with a laugh on her lips. And by his corpse,
" GOOD AND EYIL CLEAVING TOGETHER." 79
when it lay there, torn, pale, its beauty shattered, and
its glory stricken, I took my oath to God and him to
know no rest until I had revenged him ! "
She paused again ; and in the silence between them
there sounded the melancholy lulling of the ocean
like the endless ebb and flow of human passions, ever
renewing, never at rest. Then her chanting and
melodious tones took up their burden once more :
"And I have kept my vow. I joined my own
people again; but, unseen, undreamt of by her, I
have followed in her track, groping in the dark for
some dropped clue, some broken thread to guide me to
the redemption of my oath. She never saw me save
once, when she bade her hireling strike me out of her
path like a dog ; yet I never let her escape me, but
followed ever in her shadow, as her doom should
follow a murderess. Oftentimes my errand seemed
hopeless, and I said in my heart, ' Fool ! can the field-
lark cope with the falcon f can the emmet destroy the
gazelle t how then canst thou reach her ? ' Yet ever
again I took patience and courage, since ever in my
ear his voice seemed crying, ' Revenge! revenge V
and when my soul fainted because of the weariness of
its travail, I thought of him as I had beheld him,
driven to his death by her, with his beautiful face
shattered and ghastly, and bathed in its blood ! Then
I gathered my strength afresh, and afresh pursued
her, blindly, but yet in security, for I believed that
the hour would come wheat the God of Vengeance at
length would deliver her into my hand. And lo ! the
80 STBATHMOBE.
hour at last is here. Yet now that I have the know-
ledge my power is too weak to turn it against her. I,
poor and lowly, and whose voice would never be heard,
cannot use what I have found. But you, English
lord, can do with it what you will. I, the Vagrant,
and you, the Noble, both hate ; let the great take the
key to his vengeance from the obscure. The worm
has burrowed, let the tiger rend ! "
Her voice ceased, and there was silence again be-
tween them, whilst the winds swept with hollow echo
through the arched cloisters where they stood, these
strange companions thus strangely drawn together,
with the great chasm of social difference yawning
between them, only bridged by the community of
hatred, which, like the community of love, binds
together those who are farthest asunder. He had
heard her throughout without interruption, and as the
moonlight fell about him she saw the varied passions
that swept across his face, and the tiger glare darken-
ing his eyes. As dried wood ready for the burning
leaps up to the touch of flame, so the lust of re-
venge which was within him leapt up to the woman's
words,
"To set her suffer!"
He, too, was athirst for it. All that was evil and
merciless latent in his nature and there was very
much had fastened on one desire : to wreak the
fulness of some hideous revenge where he had blindly
doted. And he stood now silent, while many thoughts
" GOOD AND EVIL CLEAVING TOGETHEK ." 81
coursed through his brain, larvae of evil which the
hotbed of remorse was swiftly* nourishing to deed.
A profound and rapid reader of human character
and motive, this woman's soul was bare before him as
a book, and in it he read truth. Her history brought
back to him that which had once been told him at
Vernonfeaux of Marc Lennartson's death and of its
cause, and he saw that the heart of the Bohemian, un-
tamed and untutored, knowing no god but its love,
and no heaven but its hate, would make no erring
flight to the quarry of its vengeance. He saw that
this woman held, or believed she held, the key to the
redemption of her oath ; and he saw that, weak with
her sex's tenderness, yet thereby strong as her sex
ever is, ignorant, and malleable as wax in his
guidance, yet with the tenacity of an Indian in
tracking the trail she followed, she would be his tool
to work as he would.
For one moment he paused ; the pride of rank and
of habitual reserve, rather, perchance, than any nobler
prthciple, shrinking from association with the Git&na,
rejecting the employment of one thus far beneath him,
loathing his instrument because he must make it even
with himself if he once stooped to use it. That
moment passed ; then he motioned her from him :
"I will hear you ; follow me."
And she followed him in silence down the cloister
as he went onwards to the entrance of the Abbey,
which stood out, a grey, sombre, stately pile, in the
- VOL. II. a
82 STRATHMOBE.
moonlight that was shining white upon its delicate
fretwork and its pointed windows, and leaving deep in
shadow its masses of Norman stone and battled wall
shrouded in their vast elm-forests.
An hour afterwards the dark figure of the Bohemian
moved swiftly and silently across the park of White
Ladies, taking the road which led to the little hamlet
beyond the gates, and at the window of the library
where his audience had been given to this strange, un-
fitting guest, Strathmore stood leaning out to catch
the coolness of the autumn night fire seemed on his
brain, fire in his blood, for the hatred of men of his
race had ever outweighed and outstripped the sweet-
ness and the madness of their love. And as a sleuth-
hound scents the trail of what he would hunt down-
ward to its death, so he now saw shadowed out before
him the sure track of a deadly vengeance.
Here, beneath the roof of the Dominican Abbey,
which once had sheltered both, both seemed beside
him: the woman who had betrayed him, the ntan
whom he had slain. The sweat of a great horror
gathered thick upon his brow flee where he would
these must ever pursue him, wander where he would
for ever on his lips must burn the delicious lie of her
guilty kiss, for ever in his path must rise the spectre
of that death-agony which he had gazed on with a
smile. For Conscience is God ; and hide us where we
will, it tracks us out, and we must look whither it bids,
we must listen to that which it utters, we must behold
" GOOD AND EVIL CLEAVING TOGETHEB." 83
that which it brings, in the reeling revel as in the
silent dawn, in the dull stupor of sleep as in the
riotous din of orgies; from its pursuit there is no
escape, from its tribunal there is no appeal.
And where he stood, while through the silence
there seemed to echo the mocking music of Marion
Vavasour's sweet, accursed laugh, and down the hush
of night there seemed to tremble the dying sigh of
him whom he had murdered at her bidding, good and
evil strove together in his heart ; the remorse that
should have purified like fire, and the hatred which,
like fire, would destroy.
Atonement ! his soul hungered for it. It had been
shattered from his hand to-night; yet, later on, it
might be wrested back. If he gathered, by his will
and by his wealth, about the young child whom he
had orphaned, all that earth can know of gladness,
shelter, riches, tenderness ; if, for her father's sake,
and in her father's trust, he made her future cloudless
as the lif e of the flower which but opens to the light
to rejoice through the sunny length of a fair summer
day, and made her lips only speak his name in grati-
tude and blessing, the sin might be atoned ? He had
loved the man whom he had brutally slain : through
the young life given by the dead, should expiation to
the dead be wrought.
Expiation to the dead; but to the living Ven-
geance.
The lust for it was in his blood as strong as at that
hour when his hand had been upon her throat, her life
g2
84 STBATHMOBE.
within his grasp: and the power of vengeance lay
now within his grip. " To see her suffer" suffer, and
plead for mercy, and be denied, even as she had denied
it, and find her loveliness of no avail to shield her
from the doom of an unerring and a pitiless fate !
For this his soul was athirst ; to its purpose his life
was set ; he saw it looming through the darkness of
the future ; the pursuit in which his speed would
never slacken, in whose success v his will would never
relent.
In this hour, when he stood alone in the autumn
night, with no companion save the distant lulling of
the weary seas; of his remorse was begotten his
atonement, of his hatred his revenge.
Twin-born, must not one strangle the other in the
birth? Or, twin-nurtured into strength and life,
could both prosper side by side?
85
CHAPTEK IX.
THE FRAIL ARGOSY WHICH WAS FREIGHTED WITH
ATONEMENT.
For a year Strathmore was not seen in Europe.
Eumour, which must always lie rather than keep
silence, bahbled now and again remembrance of him ;
he had been seen in* Thebes ; he had been met on the
Amazon, or the Ganges; he had been heard of as
dwelling at Damascus, and studying the buried learn-
ing of the East ; he had been slain in a midnight fray
with dragomans close by the Gates of the Kings in
Egypt; these were among the things that Eumour
babbled of him, and that Eumour lied, for none were
true. Those who knew him best deemed that he
shunned the world, and had sought solitude; and
these also erred. For Strathmore was of a nature
which masked anguish with an iron strength and an
impassive calm, and to which the artificial atmosphere,
the feverish crowds, the profound ambitions of the
86 STRATHMORE.
great world, were the necessities of existence ; of the
air of the mountain and the valley he had ever
wearied ; his breath was the breath of cities. Whafc-
ever of returning peace the eternal calm of mountains
and the freshness of trackless forests may lend to the
man whom the world has wronged, they have none
for the man self-doomed by a self-chosen guilt. Now
solitude was abhorrent to him to be alone with
Nature, man must be at peace with Himself.
Solitude ! while over the still, starlit, pathless ocean
in the hush of night there seemed to steal the quiver
of that dying sigh. . Solitude! while the crimson
glare of the desert sunlight, streaming from the
brazen skies, seemed reddened with the blood that he
had shed. Solitude ! while in the fairest fall of the
tropic night, there seemed to look into his those dying
eyes with their look of blind, beseeching pain. His
solitude was a hell.
Yet for a year he was absent from Europe, and
though many babbled of him, none truly saw him, or
knew whither he had gone. He was absent for a
year. For he held, what had been ever the creed of
those of his blood, that vengeance accomplished, is
crime acquitted, and remorse dulled.
And patiently and ruthlessly as the sleuth-hound
follows in the trail of its prey, he followed the track
of his revenge. For his own agony had not taught
him mercy, and in pursuit this man was untiring and
inexorable.
In the betrayal of his love he had suffered enough
THE AEGOSY OF ATONEMENT. 87
to have chastened his sin to its full due; the most
rigid moralist might have compassionated him be-
neath the tortures of his guilt-stained passion. It
had not been love with Strathmore, it had been wor-
ship blind and insensate, if you will ; but one into
which his whole being had been absorbed, which had
cast down unheeding every sacrifice at her feet, which
would have died for her, content if his last breath
had been spent upon her lips, and which had laid
waste his life as no merely sensual passion could have
ever done, when he had learned that his love had
betrayed him, her fealty forsaken him, that her kiss,
her sigh, her smile, her loveliness were divine lies, as
free to all the world as to himself ! The hate where-
with he hated her was as mighty, therefore, as the
love wherewith he loved her. Born with that certain
taint of cruelty which often belongs to a character in
which desire of power is dominant, and which an
imperious, negligent egotism renders indifferent to all
not touching on itself, the latent trait hitherto negative
or dormant, rose under the pressure of maddened
passion and grief, into an accursed thirst for retalia-
tion. Ere this he would not have inflicted pain save
when compelled to do so to clear his path, or to
advance an aim; now, the germ grown into a tree,
the seed sprung to a disease, the passive quality that
had lain in his nature, grew active, inflexibility ripened
into cruelty, and he set himself with pitiless purpose
to work such ruin as he should watch and taste and
prolong to slow protracted pain, and deal out as
88 STRATHMORE.
though his hand and his will had but to wield the
iron flail of destiny*.
Blindly as Othello had he worshipped what he
loved ; ruthlessly* as Othello he now longed to crush
her out with his own hand where none could gaze on
the loveliness which had betrayed him ; for there is
no cruelty with which passion has not been allied;
there is no vengeance so remorseless as that which
has its birth in love that has turned to hate. And
although his nature had been bowed and bent under
the weight of its agony, as steel in the forging and the
flame of the furnace, it had but grown like the steel
in the ordeal, the keener to strike, the surer to slay.
Because a ceaseless remorse ate like fire into his soul,
he clung but the closer to his vengeance ; because an
anguish of regret smote his strength till it sickened
and reeled in the torture of his lonely hours, he reared
that strength but the higher, to gather afresh the
reins of fate into his grasp, and build up with his own
hand the structures of expiation and of chastisement.
Strathmore, great in much, weak in much, and
guilty in far more, was very human; for human
nature, with many touches of deity in it, has yet far
more of devil, and is a tree of which
Bed quantum vertice ad auras
JEtheriaa, tantnm radice in Tartars tendit.
And of the few boughs which stretch to heaven, how
many fibres strike to hell !
Where the Atlantic waves wash on the western
THE ABGOSY OP ATONEMENT. 89
shore, and the headlands are clad with ivy and trailing
honeysuckle ; where the white surf foams up on the
ribbed pearly sands, and in the shadows of the
hollowed rocks, ever sounds from dawn to sunset
the delicate music of birds' voices mingling with the
murmur of the seas ; there was sheltered the young life
which Strathmore's crime had orphaned in its opening.
It was a fitting place for childhood to grow up in,
free as the winds which swept over the ocean, joyous
as the white-winged sea-birds which cleft their path
through the sunlight ; this place on the western sear-
board, with the melody of its waves echoing through
the day and night, with its warm breezes blowing
over golden gorse and purple heather, with its snowy
breakers dashing on the rocks, and with its broad
blue waters tossing seaweed in the light of a summer's
noon.
There, where the boughs of the trees drooped almost
to the edge of the sheltered sunny bay in St. George's
Channel, and through the opened windows on a sum-
mer dawn came the voices of the fishermen, and the
sound of the sea, and the piping of .the waking birds,
dreamily mingled in one pleasant music, lived the
one who filled her dead parent's place to Erroll's
young child Lady Castlemere. Although he had
given to her but negligent regard, a cold ceremonial
of attachment, Strathmore's mother had loved him,
not in his childhood or his youth, for she had then
been apolitical leader absorbed in her great party, but
proudly and warmly now that she followed his career
90 STEATHMOBE.
from her solitude by the western shores, whither she
had gone when age and delicacy of health had made
the great world distasteful, and had softened that
haughty dullness which came with her Norman blood.
A stately and noble woman still, with that which had
been unyielding in her nature rendered touchingly
gentle under the hand of Time, which mellows whilst
it destroys, she left the proud station of Marchioness
of Castlemere to her elder son's wife, and merged
her own ambitions into those of Strathmore, whom
she saw seldom, but of whom the world told her
much. She had bitterly mourned when she heard of
the slavery into which a woman's beauty had fettered
him, and had shuddered aghast at that deadly tragedy
which the world passed over with a light forgiving
name. But in his guilt she loved him more truly,
perhaps, than she had ever done ; and in his guilt his
thoughts turned to her.
It was his mother to whom he had delegated, and
who had accepted that trust which the death of the
wife had rendered it alone possible to fulfil to the
child ; and in proportion to the remorse which gnawed
to his heart's core with every remembrance of the
man whom he had murdered, was his almost morbid
craving to fulfil to its uttermost breadth and depth
that which he looked on as a request to be obeyed
sacredly and unceasingly, as the sole atonement that
lay in his power to render to the dead.
If you haw once known what it is to recal, in a
too late repentance, cruel words spoken, harsh thoughts
THE AEGOSY OF ATONEMENT. 91
uttered, to one whom you loved well and who has
gone from you for ever beyond hearing of your
prayer ; and to lavish your care in your poor mise-
rable futile longing for some atonement, or cleaving
to some relic of, the dead on horse, or dog, or flower
that he or she had treasured, then you know in some
faint shadow of its bitterness that which he now felt ;
that on which he now acted.
The heart of his mother yearned to him in his
crime and his remorse. For his sake, and at his wish,
she accepted the guardianship of ErrolFs young child:
he coupled it with the condition first, that the child
as she grew up should be taught to look upon him as
her friend and guardian, and, again, that she should
never be told her father's name* So, alone, could none
unfold to her the history of her father's death; so,
alone, could she grow up ignorant that the hand
which fostered and sheltered her was stained with
her fathers blood.
It was easy to accomplish this. Erroll's marriage
had been known to none; the clergyman of the
obscure village where the ceremony had been per-
formed was dead ; his wife had still borne her maiden
name; the servants, the doctor, and the vicar at
White Ladies had looked on the offspring of their
union as a " love-child," and there were no others who
even knew of her birth. Accordingly, when the
.young Lucille was secretly removed and placed with
Lady Castlemere, under her mother's Hungarian
name, as an orphan whom she had adopted, and to
92 STRATHMORE.
whom her son had been appointed guardian, into a
matter of so little moment none inquired, and his
mother's protection of her excluded any coarser sup-
position as to Strathmore's relationship to her, which,
under other circumstances, might have been mooted,
to her disadvantage in later years. On her he settled,
independently of himself, a considerable sum, more
than sufficient for all needs of her nurture and edu-
cation, and, in the case of his death, provided that she
should inherit largely of his wealth. He desired that
if she grew to womanhood she should hold his name
in love and gratitude, ignorant of the heritage of
wrong she owed to him ; he longed that there should
be one innocent life on earth unaware of the guilt
which lay upon his soul. And here, too, the will of
the dead strengthened and sanctioned his own: Erroll
had written, "Never let her know that it was by your
hand I fell." A wish of his was now more sacred to
the one who had slain him, than all the laws of God
and Man which he had broken !
The arrangements with his mother had been all made
before he quitted England, and the child had been a
year in the dower-house of Silver-rest, happy as a
joyous childhood ever is from the sunrise of its care-
less, cloudless days to the sunset of its peaceful,
dreamless nights ; happy with the seaweeds for her
treasures, and the yellow gorse for her; wealth, and
the hushing of the seas for her slumber-song, yet
it might have been whimsically fancied with the
regret of her mother's loss vaguely told in the wistful
THE ABGOSY OP ATONEMENT. 93
gaze of her fair eyes, and the shadow of her father's
dark and early doom left in the touching and uncon-
scious sadness, which stole like a fate over her young
face in sleep or in repose.
She had been there a year, when, in the close of
the summer, Strathmore's yacht, Sea Foamy bringing
him, as most believed, from the trackless forests
and buried cities of Mexico, came to anchor in the
little western bay, after her long run across the
Atlantic, before she went down Channel. He landed,
and went on alone to Silver-rest in the morning light.
Far as the eye could reach stretched, the deep still
waters of the bay ; the white sails of his yacht and of
the few fishing skiffs in the offing stood out distinct
and glancing in the sun ; over the bluffs and in all
the clefts of rock the growing grass blew and flickered
in the breeze; and as he crossed the sands the air
was fragrant with the scent of wild flowers that grew
down to the water's edge.
But to note these things a man must be in unison
with the world ; to love them he must be in unison
with himself. Strathmore scarce saw them as he
went onward; all that he beheld was the Future and
the Past, the vengeance which should stand in the
stead to him of all that he had forfeited, and the
crime which gnawed unceasingly at his heart, as the
vulture at the living entrails of the doomed. Out-
wardly, he was unchanged : the cold, urbane manner,
the chill, keen brilliance natural to him were* un-
altered ; he was a courtier and a man of the world ;
94 STRATHMORE.
for twenty years to come he would not change per-
ceptibly ; but in character he had altered much ; or
rather to speak more truly his nature had leapt up
from its repose like a lion from its sleep. An agony
of repentance had shaken his soul to the dust, rousing
it for ever from the calm egotism in which he had
bade it lie ; a guilty passion had swept over his life
like a whirlwind, smiting from his hands for ever the
curb with which he had boasted, god-like, to rein his
passions at his will. The temple which he had built to
himself had been riven to the ground by the thunder-
bolts of the storm : a holier from its ruins might yet
have arisen, but that with his own hands he chose to
fashion the twin structures of Retribution and Ex-
piation. Briefly, Strathmore had grown at once more
sensitive and more dangerous, and though the whole
creed of his pride had been scattered, like leaves before
the wind, before the test of a great temptation, though
the strength which had haughtily held all human error
aloof and in disdain, had succumbed to the first attack
of passion, and had wrought a foul crime as calmly
as a righteous act, Strathmore never altered in this :
life was still to be moulded by his will, and by his
decree he held still that he should rule fate even as
Deity! Alas!
Evil or good may be better, or worse,
la the human heart, but the mixture of each
Is a manrel and a curse !
This is the widest truth in human life, but it is one
little remembered among men.
THE AEGOST OF ATONEMENT. 95
He went this morning where, in his yearning love
for the man whose blood was on his hands, he had
centred his sole chance and choice of expiation on the
frail life of a young child. As he walked onward
over the wet smooth sand he came into a sheltered
semicircle in the rocks, part of the grounds of Silver-
rest, where the trailing plants were thick and odorous,
forming a hanging screen of flowers, through which
the sun-rays played upon the pools, and on the
boulders that glowed deep red where the water had
splashed them wet ; and here he stopped, for lying on
the wild ivy full length, with two setters beside him,
he saw a boy of some ten years old, Lionel Caryll,
the son of one of his sisters by an ill-fated mesalliance,
who, early left an orphan, had always been brought
up by Lady Castlemere.
The boy started, rose, amd stood shyly silent; he
had seen but little of Strathmore, and of that little
he was afraid. He was a handsome child of the
Saxon type, with a fair, tanned skin, and a mane of
fair, tangled hair. Strathmore put out his hand
carelessly to him ; he disliked and never noticed
children.
u How are you, Nello V 9
The boy, shy still, did not answer, and Strathmore
passed onward, putting aside a quantity of creepers
which, hanging from the shelf of rock above, ob-
structed his progress. But the boy sprang forward
with an eager gesture r
" Stop ! please pray ! you will wake her I"
96 STEATHMOEE.
"Wake what!"
"Wake her! and she was so tired.*
Strathmore instinctively looked down, deeming that
the boy's care referred to some pet setter or retriever.
Amongst the long grass under the ledge of rock,
with the sunlight streaming fitfully through the leaves
upon her, with her arms above her head, and her
limbs lying in the pliant, unconscious grace of child-
hood and of sleep, there at his feet lay the child he
had last seen at the death-bed of her mother. Her
clasped hands held a long trail of ivy, her fair hair
was wreathed in with a childish crown of wood violets,
and her face was turned towards him with the dark
lashes resting on its warm, flushed cheeks, and in
its loveliness, still almost that of infancy, the shadow
of that unconscious sadness which seemed like the
shadow of her father's fate ; a presage, or a heritage,
of woe.
Strathmore paused, and a shudder ran through his
frame ; again this young child, in her innocent sleep,
seemed to him as his worst accuser, seemed to him at
once her father's phantom and avenger; and again
this time, as she slept, the smile that smote him to the
heart parted her lips and passed over her face, the
smile that he had seen so often on the lips of the
Dead.
Lionel Oaryll looked at him, awed and terrified, he
barely knew why :
" Are you ill?" the boy asked timidly.
Strathmore signed him away :
THE AEGOST OP ATONEMENT. 97
u Yes no. Go on and tell my mother I am here,
Nello. I will follow."
The boy hesitated, and looked at the sleeping child
who had been his companion in play.
u Will you take care of Lucille I "
Accustomed to deference, and intolerant of oppo-
sition, Strathmore signed him away :
" Go, and do as I bade you."
The boy wavered, looking wistfully at his com-
panion, and doubtfully at Strathmore ; then, instinc-
tively compelled to obedience, he went like a grey-
hound over the sands, followed by his setters.
Strathmore was left alone with the remorse which
' an infant's smile had sufficed to waken into all its
anguish such is the coward doom of Crime.
He stood in solitude, with the sound of the seas
about him, and at his feet the sleeping child, with the
Violets tangled in her fair, floating hair ; and as he
looked on her young loveliness, which, so different
yet so similar, bore so strange a likeness of her
father's face, memories thronged upon him, starting
from the haze of long forgotten years, and gathering
around him, even as the pursuant Shapes gathered
about the Slayer in Hellas, till the air, which was
clear to the sinless, grew, to the accursed, darkened
and crowded with their thronging, shadowy forms.
He remembered Erroll, a young child, even as this,
with the same fair, trailing hair, and the same smile
like sunshine on his lips; he heard his fresh, glad
laugh ring on the summer air ; he heard his childish
VOL. II. . H
98 8TBATHX0BE.
voice echo upon his ear; he felt the touch of his
young hand ; he lived again in those years that had
long drifted by, forgotten in the whirl of years more
evil, when in his own soul there was no sin, when the
man whom he had murdered played beside him in the
sunlight, when his life was guiltless as that on which
he now looked, where it lay sleeping at his feet !
And a bitter cry broke from him where he stood
on the solitary shore :
"My friend! My brother!"
Back upon his ear the echo of the rocks around
wailed in return his own yearning, futile anguish,
like a prayer fruitless and rejected of Heaven.
In the sunny stillness of the noon Strathmore
bowed down his head upon his hands, and his frame
shook with the throes of the remorse which could not
force back the sealed portals of the grave, which
could not call to earth the existence one fleeting
instant had been sufficient to destroy. He could not
have told how long he had sat there in the solitude,
where every stirring pulse of life, from the noiseless
rush of the sea-birds' wings to the faint shouts of the
fishermen across the bay, seemed like the voice of
God calling upon him to answer for the life he had
hurled into the grave ; moments might have passed,
or hours,' when he was roused by the silken touch of
hair against his hand, and a voice which whispered
softly in his ear :
" You are not happy ! tell Lucille !"
He started and looked up; the young child,
THE ARGOSY OP ATONEMENT. 99
awakened from her sleep, had come to him, and
vaguely grieving for the grief she could not compre-
hend, as spaniels do at sight of human pain, was
blindly striving, as a spaniel might, to comfort him.
Losing fear of a stranger in her child's compassion,
she had drawn close to him, so that her bright hair
swept over his hands, and in her large soft eyes stood
tears half of terror half of pity for the suffering
which she saw and vaguely felt, with answering pain,
as the spaniel the sorrow of which he nothing knows.
And her young voice, tremulous but tenderly caress-
ing, murmured in his ear, u Lucille is sorry for you
do tell Lucille?"
With a gesture as though a serpent had stung him,
Strath^ore started, flung her off, and quivered like a
man who has been struck a death-blow.
"Child, child! hate me, curse me, reproach me,
but oh, God ! do not pity me ! Keep off ; my
hands are red with his blood, yours must not touch
them!"
The wild words died inarticulate in his throat, and
his teeth clenched as the anguish she had strung to
torture rent and tore his frame the worst chastise-
ment from the hands of man would have been mercy
to the reproach of those innocent words which pitied
him; to the unconscious accusation of those uplifted
eyes gazing with a child's tender yet wondering com-
passion on the face of her father's murderer !
She stood apart awed and silent, the tears standing
in her eyes, that were at all times wistful with a
H2
100 STBATHMOBE.
haunting, beseeching sadness; the fierce gesture
which had flung her off she understood, the words
she did not, they were unintelligible indeed, un-
heard but she waited, pale to her lips, and trem-
bling like a young fawn after a cruel blow, yet drawn
by a strange instinct of compassion towards this
agony, which she seemed to know was brutal, not to
her, but from its own blind pain. She waited, then
grown more daring, and taught by those who in-
stilled to her an infinite love for all who suffered, she
drew near him again nearer and nearer, till her
hair swept once more on his hand, and a pathetic
entreaty trembled in her voice :
" Speak to me do speak to me ? Lucille meant
no 08!.''
Again at her touch and her voice he shrank and
shuddered as under physical torture ; this child came
with caressing gentleness and plaintive pity to the
one whose guilt had orphaned her, and to whose
hands she owed the deepest wrong that life can owe
to life ! Then he lifted his head and looked at her ;
when his resolve was set his strength was iron to
bridle himself or to coerce others, and it was his will
that she should grow up holding him in love and
gratitude, and ignorant ever of the crime which
otherwise must stretch, a hideous and impassable gulf,
between her and the assassin of her father. He
passed his hand lightly over her fair silken hair, and
answered gently :
THE ABGOST OF ATONEMENT. 101
"Lucille is very kind. I thank her. Tell me, you
who axe so pitiful to pain, are you happy t "
"Always."
Her eyes looked their mute surprise that any one
could ask her such a question, and a smile played
about her lips as she drew a long glad breath, re-
calling her own exhaustless treasury of joy the joys
born of sea, and bird, and flower, of a crown of forest
violets, and a chase of summer butterflies ! The joys
which are pure, and cost no pang of shame, no pur-
chase-gold of guilt, in their glad reaping !
Strathmore found in the simple answer the first
seed of his atonement ; it was much to him to learn
from the child's fresh, truthful lips that she was
" happy" happy by his means, and in his fulfilment
of the trust bequeathed him by the dead. His hand
rested on her hair, and his eyes upon her face, as she
leaned against him caressingly and without fear, as
though he were known and dear to her, rather than,
as he was, a stranger. Skilled in reading human
features, he read the nature easily which was dawn-
ing here, the susceptibility to joy and pain suggested
by the lips with their mournful lines in repose, and
their sunny, laughing smile which sparkled and then
died; the too early depth and poetry of thought
which were written on the low, broad brow; the
latent tenderness which lay in the sadness of the
upward look, and in the liquid melancholy depths of
the eyes, soft and dreamy as the night. These might
have told him that to secure happiness to the Child-
102 STBATHMOKE.
hood was easy, with its fleeting pleasures centred in a
bird's carol, in a dog's love; but to secure it to the
Womanhood was a more perilous venture, which
might chance on shipwreck.
At that moment a little toy-spaniel that was with
him caught her eyes, and with a child's swift change
of thought she uttered a laugh of delight, and threw
herself upon the sands beside it, kissing its long ears;
and bathing it fondly in her bright long hair. With
a stifled cry Strathmore seized the animal from her
arms: the dog was the one which had nestled in
ErrolTs breast, and refused to leave the side of the
dead man ; he could not see the child in her uncon-
sciousness caress the brute whose fidelity had outlived
his own, whose watch had been kept over her father's
corpse!
She looked up at him, deeming that she had com-
mitted some great fault in touching a stranger's dog
without his leave; and with caressing grace and
penitence she leaned against him, lifting her dark,
beseeching eyes :
" Lucille is sorry Lucille was wrong ! But he is
so pretty, and he would love me all things do I "
Callous to much, merciless to more, Strathmore,
who had deemed that nothing in life could ever
wound or move him, felt the burning tears gather in
his eyes at the simple words and action of this child,
so unconscious of his own deep guilt, and of her own
great wrong ! His voice shook as he stooped to her :
" The dog is yours none have so great a right ;
THE AEGOSY OF ATONEMENT. 103
Lucille, if all things love you, will you give some love
tome!"
She looked surprised yet wistful, and her eyes dwelt
on him earnestly.
" Yes, Lucille will love you. But not for the dog.
Tell me your name, that I may say it in my prayers ?"
For many moments he made her no answer ; and
in the silence his loud laboured breathings hoarsely
rose and fell. Then his hand passed slowly and
gently over her hair, and his voice shook still.
" Ah, in your prayers ! God knows I need them
from all things innocent. Eemember me and love
me I was your fathers friend."
The last words were low with a great agony, and
seemed to rend and stifle him in their utterance.
His hand lingered for a moment in farewell upon her
hair; then he turned and left her, bidding the
spaniel, which clung to and fawned upon the child,
stay with her. Young Caryll was coming swift as
the winds towards them. Strathmore passed him
without word or sign and went onward, leaving be-
hind him, standing together on the sunny silvery-
sands, the boy Nello and the young child Lucille^
between them the little dog which had crouched in
its love upon the dead main's breast, when human
friendship had betrayed, and human watchers had
forsaken him.
104
CHAPTER X.
THE WHISPER IN THE TUILEBIES.
Marion Lady Vayasouk stood in her dressing-
chamber, before her Dresden-framed mirror, come
from a fete of one of the leaders of that brilliant set of
which she was still the Fashion, the Cynosure, and the
Queen. The lustrous light in those superb eyes was
not dimmed ; the mocking smile on those lovely lips
laughed triumph that was unshadowed ; the fair Irow
and the delicate bloom wore the brightness of their
youth unmarred. For the world was as ever a her
feet, and remorse had no part and no share with her ;
it could not whisper in her golden dreams, nor dog
the royal negligent step with which she swept through
life. Remorse! She knew it not. How could its
ghastly cry be heard above the ceaseless chant of
homage about her path? how could its dread terrors
force their way into the proud and dazzling presence
to which kings bent and princes knelt ?
THE WHISPEB IK THE TUILEBIES. 105
She knew revenge, she knew cruelty, so do the
velvet panther and the painted snake ; but she knew
not remorse, neither do they ; and that dark tragedy
of which she had been the cause, touched her no more
than these are touched by the death they deal save
that she knew, when the world babbled of it, it
babbled of her power; save that she loved to learn
how deeply a woman's smile may strike, how widely
a woman's loveliness may blast. True ! till she had
wearied of the fidelity even of a guilty passion, all
that she had vowed to Strathmore had, perchance, not
been a lie ; true ! there had come hours when she
had thought that had they met earlier, met when
their love might have been pure, and the breath of
the world had not sullied their hearts, she might have
given him such constancy as poets fable and as she
mocked : the fleetest rivers have their deeper waters,
the most heartless amidst us have their better hours.
But her lust was Tyranny, her glory Power, and the
evil which she worked smote not upon her for her,
as for Greek Helen, brethren warred with brethren,
and men cast their lives into the slaughter ! And this
triumph was her crown. She stood now before her
mirror, and let her gaze dwell proudly on the peerless
form whose divine grace no living woman rivalled ;
then she swept onward to her carriage to go to that
world which was her court. She was the most beau-
tiful woman of her time. Who shall give me title so
omnipotent, sceptre so mighty?
Where she went was to the Tuileries. Here the
106 STRATHMOBE.
English Peeress, the beauty of Paris, the leader of
Fashion, had ever found her proudest triumphs ; here
to-night, as countless nights before, Princes coveted
her smiles, Queens were outdazzled by her, and Sove-
reignties paled beside the sway of the woman whose
beauty owned no rival ; here, Marion Lady Vavasour
was in the height of her brilliance, and her fame.
And here, and thus she was watched by the man
whom her love had made a slave, whom her lie had
made a murderer. ,
She glittered through the titled crowds that were
gathered in the palace of the Bourbons, with the sap-
phires glancing among her amber hair, and her smile
of superb triumph upon her lovely lips, her choice
and delicate wit falling like a shower of silver, her
resistless coquetries charming to blindness all drawn
within her circle in the salons of a Bang. And he
watched her this divine loveliness that had betrayed
him with a kiss ; this soft and patrician thing that had
forsaken him with the vileness of the wanton ; those
angel lips with their childlike bloom, which had whis-
pered and wooed him to the bottomless abyss of
crime. So much the more madly worshipped once
ay, still! so much the more mercilessly was she
now doomed, so much the more deeply damned !
The palace was thronged that night. The ball
was on the occasion of a royal marriage, and all that
was greatest in Europe was assembled at the Tuile-
ries ; but as her sapphires outshone all the jewels of
royal peeresses and imperial orders, so she outshone
THE WHISPBB IN THE TUILEEIES. 107
all the loveliness gathered there, while she floated
through its courtly crowds, now listening to the flat-
teries of Princes of the Blood, now to the murmur of
velvet -lipped Cardinals, now bending to her feet
austerest Statesmen, now seeing bowed before her
some proud crowned head. And Memory was far
away from her in her superb omnipotence, her cloud-
less present far as was Remorse !
She passed down the Salle des Marechaux on the arm
of the Due d'Etoile, her perfumed lace floating about
her, the sapphires starlike above her brow, the light fall-
ing on her dazzling face ; and every glance involun-
tarily turned on her and on her Royal lover, for such
he had notably become. But as she went, unrivalled
in her omnipotence, unequalled in her beauty, sweep-
ing through the courtly crowds with wit on her lips and
conquest in her glance, the eye of D'Etoile, resting on
her, saw her face grow pale and a strange tremor seize
her.
What was it ? Was there poison in that perfumed
air miasma in those royal salons plague-taint, or
subtle death-odour, burning from the lights which
gleamed above upon her loveliness, or exhaling from
the jewels which glistened in her bosom ? No, none
of these ; we are not in the days of Medici and Sf orza ?
and (grown virtuous from dread of science and of law)
we do not slay the body, we only slay by slow and
sure degrees the soul, the honour, or the peace of what
we hate, because this is a homicide absolved of men.
What was it, then, that, suddenly as she swept
108 8TBATHMOBE.
through the presence-chamber of the Tuileries, made
her lips grow white, her eyes gleam for one fleeting
moment with the terror of a hunted antelope, her
hand tremble on her Boyal lover's arm? It was this
only the whisper of two words, which seemed to
float to her from a distance, yet which reached no ear
save hers :
" Marian St. Maw."
She glanced on all immediately about her cour-
tiers, ministers, ambassadors, princesses, peeresses,
maids of honour but she saw that as none of these
had heard, so none of these had spoken that whisper
of her maiden name. But as she lifted her eyes, they
fell upon the face of the man she had forsaken and
betrayed ; the man who, in the last hour she had
beheld him, had hurled her from him because death
was too swift and merciful a vengeance.
Strathmore stood at some slight distance, leaning
against a console where the light fell full upon his face,
which wore its look of cold and pitiless calm ; and his
eyes were upon her, watching her with a steel-like
glitter, a dark tiger-passion, insatiate and without
mercy, that the drooped lids did not veil.
And she who in her light insouciance, her omni-
potence of beauty, feared Heaven and its wrath as
little as the most daring of blasphemers, the most
stoic of philosophers, turned pale even to her laugh-
ing lips, and felt the air turn sickly faint, the lights
whirl round her, the crowd grow dizzily indistinct,
and saw nothing but that gaze, with its mute and
THE WHISPEB IN THE TUILEEIES. 109
merciless menace, suddenly met there as a ghost arisen
from the tomb, silently quoting to her the Past,
silently threatening the Future.
The weakness endured but an instant, too swift for
even the Prince on whose arm she hung to note it, and
she passed on passed Strathmore. He did not move ;
he gave her no sign of recognition ; but his eyes rested
on her, and he smiled. She knew the deadly mean-
ing of that faint, chill smile; she had seen it on his
lips before he went from her to meet the man whom
he had doomed, and she shuddered and grew sick and
cold, and shivered with vague and intangible terror,
as at the chastisement of their mutual sin. In that
single moment, which for the first time smote on her
soft and brilliant life with a ghastly and nameless
fear, his vengeance had begun.
The flatteries had lost their honey, the homage had
lost its glory, the charm of the world was marred, the
power of her sway was broken that night to Marion
Vavasour; and while she reigned in all her radiance
in a Bang's Palace, the hand of a nameless terror lay
heavy upon her, and she saw, ever pursuing her with
its iron calm, that ruthless and unspoken doom.
Henceforth there would be poison in her wine, a
canker in her roses, a ghost beside her couch, an asp
within her bosom. His vengeance had begun.
The Paris Season had commenced, with the mar-
riage-ball at the Tuileries, something earlier than
usual, and Lady Vavasour sat in her loge at
110 8TSATHMOBE.
the Opera, moving her fan with all a Spaniard's
grace, lazily listening to Mario and Malibran, or to
the whispered worship of her cohue of courtiers, while
the delicate sandal-wood perfume floated from her
rich lace, and some of the brilliant deep-hued tropic
flowers of the East lay crown-like upon her lustrous
hair.
In the light, in the warmth, with a Prince's homage
murmured in her ear, with diamonds of untold price
glistening in her bosom, with a proud title of her own,
in the sight of a proud Order, surely she, if any, was
secured from the evil stroke of bitter fortune ; looking
on her, it seemed that even Death itself must pass by
this beautiful, pampered, imperious thing, as too fair
to smite, too full of sovereignty to slay ! Yet where
she sat, with the sweetness of music lulling her ear,
and the gaze of lovers' eyes worshipping her beauty
and entreating for its smile, lapped in her own dazzling,
voluptuous, victorious Present, like the epicurean she
was, the same fear which had suddenly smitten her in
the presence-chamber of the Tulieries smote her sud-
denly here, the same chill ran through her, the same
emotion for one brief instant blanched her lips, gave
terror to her eyes, made the wit falter on her tongue
f or she heard the same whispered words spoken on
the air close by her :
" Marion St. Maur I "
Yet they were but the words of the name she had
borne before marriage.
"Qu'avez vous, madame? Vous trouvez Fair du
THE WHISPEft IN THE TUILEBIES. Ill
loge tant soit peu &ouffant?" D'Etoile asked, with
tender solicitude.
" O'est l'odeur, des fleurs qu'on a mises k mon bou-
quet, prenez-le!" said Lady Vavasour, holding to
him the jewelled bouquetiere, which Etoile took with
such a subtle, graceful flattery in his thanks as only a
Parisian can turn ; but it fell for once dull and lost
on the ear to which it was murmured, as Marion
Vavasour pressed her fan against the lips on which
she knew their bloom had paled, and thought in her
soul, "Who can know it here? Not Ae, surely
not he!"
For the terror on the life of this courted and sove-
reign beauty who had been used to coquet at her
will with Destiny, and rule Fate by a sign of her fan,
a moue of her lip, was her dread of the man whose
love she had fed to madness and goaded to crime, and
who had spared her from death only that he might
see her live to suffer.
As her eyes wandered, half unconsciously, half rest-
lessly, over the house, in the full glare of the light on
the opposite side, she saw him again, saw Joim as in
the Tuileries, with his eyes fixed upon her under their
drooped lids, and upon his face that slight, chill smile
which struck like the cold touch of steel. A few
moments previous he had been in the loge which ad-
joined hers ; now he stood fronting her, looking on
her as he had trained himself to look, tranquilly, pas-
sionlessly, as in the Question Chambers of the Inqui-
sition the Dominican, with gentle voice and soul of
112 STBATHMOBE.
steel, looked on the tortured whom he doomed, and
bade the rack be turned.
And Marion Vavasour could have cried out in her
dread, and risen and left the Opera House, as though
fleeing from some haunting spectre; for she knew
then that it had been Strathmoje's voice which had
whispered her maiden name. But she was too skilled
an actress thus to betray herself ; though of much
cowardice with much cruelty (for her nature was one
essentially feminine), she had ever at command finest
finesse and calmest self-control : like many of her
sex, pusillanimous to the core, she was an actress to
the life. She sat there, now that his gaze was on her,
with the bloom on her cheek, the smile on her lips,
the lustrous languor on her eyes, while her royal
lover leaned to her with suavest homage, and the wit,
the scandal, the persiflage circled around her. She
listened, she laughed, she moved her fan with softest
coquetry; she reigned with all her negligence, her
brilliance, her grace, her imperious charm. But in the
rich harmonies of the music, the courtly flatteries of
murmured words, the jeux d'esprit, the wooing homage
which filled for her the hours of the Proph^te, she
only heard the single whisper of that name which
had told her that the secret of her early life was
in the hands of Strathmore. In the glare of light
she only saw the face of the man she had betrayed,
watching her with that merciless menace of the veiled
eyes which quoted to her the unburied past, which
foretold to her the shrouded future. Hear what she
THE WHISPEB IN THE TUILEBIES. 113
would, that name sung forever in her ear; look where
she would, that glance for ever followed and met hers ;
there in the glare of the Opera House, with the light
falling on the pale bronze of his face and the dark
gleam of his passionless eyes, he stood before her he
whose love had been insanity, whose religion would be
revenge.
And when after those brief hours, which had been
to her one long-protracted torture torture which was
endured with a smile on the lips, lustre in the eyes,
sovereignty seemingly shadowless as of yore, Marion
Vavasour, was alone in her carriage, she sank back,
trembling, quivering, unnerved, dreading evil with the
shrinking terror of a delicate woman, shuddering from
the fury of the storm whose whirlwind she, the sor-
ceress, had raised from the passions of the man she
had tempted and betrayed*
It was thus he ordained that she should suffer first,
as the Dominican, with astute calculation, commanded
that the torture should be administered gently and by
slow degrees, so that each succeeding pang was tasted
to the full. To wrench the limbs from out their sockets
at once were too much mercy. Was it no torture to
himself to go into her presence as into the presence of
strangers; to look with unmoved calm upon her face;
to hear echo on the air the silvery music of her voice ;
to stand by and watch the gaze of those who had suc-
ceeded him fasten on her loveliness, and her eyes
look up to theirs? Truly it was such that when it
had been endured, and he was alone in the solitude of
VOL. II. i
114 STBATHMOEE.
midnight or of dawn, when the strain was released,
and the unnatural calm broken down, Stathmare's
suffering was, as his love had been, a madness. In
the great agony of that last fooled, cheated, guilt-
steeped passion, which even in the riot of its hate be-
grudged the breath which whispered to another, and
envied the dog that nestled in her bosom, his misery
was fearful in its strength, fearful' in its despair, for
he loved while he loathed her still.
But Strathmare was no coward to endure; what he
appointed himself,- that he would have wrought out,
though his own life had been the penalty at the close.
His lust of vengeance was brutal, but none the less
was it immutable as death, unswerving as destiny. He
had the fierce passions and the profound dissimula-
tion of an Eastern ; therefore he trained himself to
meet her thus, and she alone read the language written
in the veiled depths of his eyes. The world, deemed
that the liaison of a year before had been: dropped by
him among the things of the past; and .the world
deemed also that, considering the tragic story which
had been interwoven with its rupture, he was some-
thing -callous to have forgot so soon ; but then,: the
world remarked, he was a cold and heartless man,
and for the issue of a duel he of course could not
reproach himself. Poor world I great spy though it
be, how surely, how universally it is chicaned !
Strathmore remained in Paris through the whole
of that winter; and through that season, rarely and
slightly at the first, more often and more markedly
THE WHISPEB IN THE TUILEBIES. 115
towards the spring, it was remarked, chiefly by-
women, that Lady Vavasour was losing the brilliance
of her beauty, and was looking pale, almost worn.
It was the first time that such a rumour had ever
been whispered against her dazzling loveliness, on
the day now eight years past, when she had first
appeared as the Marchioness of Vavasour and Vaux.
What wrought it, was that which has power to shatter
the strongest nerve, to break the boldest spirit, to
undermine the most careless insouciance it was a
hidden fear, the asp among her couch of scented
roses, the dagger suspended above her head by one
frail thread of hair, which the world could not behold,
but which never quitted her. He had shown her
that he knew her secret, and he let that knowledge
the more bitter because indefinite slowly and surely
eat its poisoned way.
They knew each other's hearts, they whom sin had
united, and sin had severed; and as she read her
doom so he read her suffering without speech, with-
out disguise. That single name breathed in her ear
told her that she was in his power; that single
glance from his eyes told her with what mercy that
power would be used; though when, or how, or
where the blow would fall, she knew no more than
.we know when the stroke . of death will descend
upon us. And it was this . endless uncertainty, this
unceasing apprehension, which wore and tortured her
till her careless, epicurean creeds were rent by it like
filmy gauze, and the woman who had become so used
12
116 8TRATHM0EE.
to sovereignty that she had learned to believe she
could command every hazard of life at her pleasure,
grew the perpetual prey of a ceaseless fear and a
momentary anxiety, which gnawed at her heart the
more cruelly because concealed from alL
Wherever she went, there Strathmore followed
her, till his presence grew as fearful to her as the
spectres which follow the distempered minds of those
in delirium tremens. In the salons of the Tuileiies,
in the reception-rooms of ambassadors, in the enter-
tainments of princes and nobles, at the Opera, on
the Boulevards, in the clear noonday as she drove
through the streets, in the midnight 'glare of light at
some patrician bal masque, she saw him; always
before her, in the distance and as a stranger whose
glance swept over her unmoved, but with the mean-
ing on his face under the cold and courtly calm,
which she had seen there when he went out to deal
death to the man he loved, and with the threat in
his fathomless eyes, which spoke to none but her.
He was ever before her like some avenging fate from
which to escape was hopeless, and which tranquilly and
immovably awaited a chosen hour to strike. He was
ever before her, with that unspoken doom in his
glance, and that unknown power silently told in the
slight, calm, cruel smile which she knew so well.
And the fear which had possessed her of him, from
the hour when her slave had risen to crush his tyrant,
and the passion she had loved to excite to delirium
had turned upon her in its madness, grew gradually
THE WHISPEB IN THE TUILEBIES. 117
under this ceaseless watch into a terror unbearable.
It made her nerves unstrung, her manner uncertain,
her glance like that of the hunted antelope, when it
listens for the eager step which gains nearer and
nearer through the awful hush of the night in the
jungles.
They noted that her bloom paled, that her dazzling
insouciance was capricious and depressed, and they
noted rightly; the beautiful hue upon her cheek,
which so long had distanced art, now needed, for the
first time, to be replaced by art. To regain that
repose which had deserted her she had refuge ill
narcotics, which, however subtle, left their depression
on the morrow; and to cover that depression had
recourse to stimulants which, however skilfully pre-
pared, left their mark on one, the happy and childlike
sunniness of whose nature had been the chief spring
of her ceaseless fascination.
The hidden canker in the rose ate at its core, and
dimmed its bloom. Marion Vavasour ere this had
been a perfect actress, and had never known one
pang of pain ; but that was when the peace and lives
of others hung in the balance. Now it was her own
that were in jeopardy; and so strong upon a mind
naturally impressionable grew her dread of the vague
doom which threatened her, and of the cold, pitiless
face which, go whither she would, seemed for ever to
pursue her, that she could have shrieked aloud and
shrank away when, day after day, night after night,
she met the gaze of Strathmore, and could have fled
118 STBATHMOKE.
oat from his presence trembling, as those who flee
from the ghastly phantom of their own imaginings.
That she never thus betrayed herself, was due to
her proud and haughty spirit; where dissimulation
alone might perchance have broken down, this
enabled her so to meet, and brave unflinchingly, what
became an hourly torture, that the world should
never have title to whisper that Marion Vavasour
was agitated by the presence of the lover whom she
had deserted. To this, also, it was due that she
never permitted her dread of Strathmore's power to
drive her from the circles where she reigned. Once
she felt tempted to flee from him to Nice, Florence,
Pau, the Nile, anywhere where her caprice or her
physicians might furnish an excuse; but she dis-
dained and repelled the temptation ; she felt that,
go where she might, there would his vengeance pur-
sue her ; she refused to give to it its first triumph by
surrender. Besides, she knew not what he knew;
and Marion Vavasour was in her own epicurean
fashion a fatalist. The blow did not fall yet, the
blow might never fall ; circumstances might arrest it,,
death itself might close his lips with her secret still
unuttered. So she reasoned, so she reigned, through-
out the Paris winter.
But in herself she never lost the sickening sense
of that dagger which hung vibrating above her head
to descend at any instant ; in her white bosom, unseen
by the world, the asp coiled ever under the freshness
of the flowers, under the brilliance of the diamonds,
j
THE WHISPEB IN THE TUILERIES. 119
and ate and ate with its poisoned fangs. He saw
how she suffered this woman to whom her sove-
reignty was her secret, to whom her pride was so
dear ; he saw, and drove the iron farther down into
her heart by every glance with which his eyes met
hers, compelling her, while the eyes of the world were
on her, to smile, to coquet, to scatter her golden wit
and her lustrous glances unmoved and undimmed,
while she grew faint and heart-sick with the terror
of that power, vague yet wide and sure as destiny,
in which he held her. Thus he tortured her till the
dread of meeting his gaze grew with her into a
morbid agony ; thus he tortured her until, imperious
beauty and accomplished actress though she was, her
cheek paled, her eyes grew anxiouB, : her health became
uncertain ; thus he tortured her, for he willed that
she should taste the full bitterness of vengeance by
being forced to watch its slow approach, as the
prisoner chained to the stake was condemned to
watch the gradual onward creeping of the pitiless
flame.
And he waited, for^the blow of hid revenge to fall
in the sight of all assembled Paris, upon the same
day in the spring-tide, as that on which, three years
before, they had met at sunset on the Bohemian
waters.
120
CHAPTER XI.
THE POISONED WOUNDS FROM THE SILVERED
STEEL.
Early in the ensuing Spring the carriage with the
coronet of Vavasour and Vaux upon its panels, its
chasseurs, its lacqueys, its postilions, its outriders, left
the court-yard of her hotel to drive amidst all the
other 61ite of the equipages of Paris, through the
Barr&re de l'Etoile, and round the Bois, and past the
site of the ancient ruins of the Abbaye de Long-
champs, whose religious rite has passed into a cere-
monial of fashion.
The day was softly bright, the city was in its
springtide gaiety, the dense crowds were sweeping,
down towards the barriferes of the west, Paris was
en fSte : and Lady Vavasour's cortege, dashing
through the streets with its accustomed royal fracas,
bore onwards to join the great stream of carriages
which brought the sovereigns of the Faubourg St.
THE SILVEBED STEEL. 121
Germain and the Quartier Br6da, the Royal High-
nesses and the Empresses Anonyma, alike to the
throng of Longchamps and the inauguration of La
Mode this sunlit day upon the Boulevards. And she
leaned back upon her cushions in her languid loveli-
ness, with the imperial ermine, a Czar's gift, which
formed her carriage-rug, turned aside, for the hour
was warm, and her priceless perfumed point d'An-
goul&ne gathered about her with that carelessness
which was her own inimitable grace. The carriage
joined the row, eight broad, on the Place de la Bastille,
and closed in with it ; all eyes turned on her, for she
gave the law of the year and led the fashion, and
men surrounded her as her Guards surround a Queen,
Princes and Ministers spurring their horses to ap-
proach her, and stooping from their saddles to seek
a word as eagerly as they would have sought a
Crown.
She swept along the Boulevards and down the
drives of the Bois, where the man whom her lie had
murdered had been slain when the sun had set ; and
the past was not remembered nor repented, for re-
morse had no share in her shadowless life ; remorse
had no place in her world.
She was alone in her carriage; none were per-
mitted that day to share that throne (of which her
barouche-step was the havtpas) of the Sovereign of
Fashion; her little lion-dog alone occupied the
cushions beside her, with his jewelled collar on his
snowy fleece, and in the double line of horsemen, on
122 StRATHMOKE.
either side the throng of carriages, on every lip there
was but one theme the beauty of the English Mar-
chioness who gave the mode to Pans.
Lady Vavasour drove onward past the site of the old
Abbaye, whilst Etoile leant from his saddle, breathing
a Prince's flatteries in her ear, until she reached the
full stream of equipages, where the occupant of
almost every carriage (that was patrician, not lorette)
was numbered on her visiting-list ; and each one of
those delicate aristocrates was either her friend for
boudoir confidences, or her acquaintance for Sta'te
dinners. And now in the rich morning sunlight, as
she encountered their equipages and received their
salutations, she saw that which sent an ice-chill
through the warm current of her glad life.
What was it, slight, nameless, intangible yet to be
felt, that she read in the glance of one or two of the
highest women of the French and English aristo-
cracies f Imperceptible to another, she caught it
for Marion Vavasour had a secret to guard, and who-
ever owns a secret always suspects that the world has
unearthed it. That which she read, or fancied, in
their look was not censure, not inquiry, not insolence,
not wonder; it was more vague than any of these,
yet to her it spoke them all. She caught it once,
twice, thrice on different faces, and her delicate bloom
paled ; it was that dullness which is marked and felt
rather by that which it suggests than by what it does,
slight, but intentional as it was unmistakable. Etoile
looked surprised ; but he was too true a gentleman to
THE SILVEEED STEEL. 123
affect to perceive what in real truth bewildered him.
For one brief second her soft antelope eyes lightened
with ill-snppressed anxiety and with unrepressed
anger ; there is no glass which reflects so delicately,
yet so bitterly and so surely,' every shade of disdain
as the faces of trained women of the world. The
steel with which their scorn thrusts is silvered, but
the wound it deals is barbed, and deep, and poisoned.
Lady Vavasour caught that disdain, and knew or
guessed its meaning, and her cheek paled under the
sea-shell bloom of her delicate rouge ; the thrust of
the silvered steel struck to her soul, for she knew that
it struck to the core of her secret.
The carriages rolled onward, and as yet the cold-
ness lay but in look, the blow was dealt but from
manner, her bows were returned as of yore, though
with a certain distance, a marked dullness ; and Etoile
found no constraint in her wit, no l'ght the less in
her luminous eyes ; she seemed to note nothing of the
look which spoke so much ! But the asp in her bosom
had fangs not one whit the less bitter because the
smile did not leave her lips, nor the nonchalant grace
of her attitude change : women cover their wounds,
but under the veil they throb they throb! The
carriages rolled on, and her postilions threading their
way through the throng passed the stately equipage
of her chosen and intimate friend Lady Clarence
Camelot that cold, proud beauty, in whose veins
ran the "blue blood" of Norman monarchs, and
whose social creeds were lofty if stringent. But
124 8TRATHM0RE.
yesternight they had sat at the Opera together, rival
rulers yet close allies; but yesterday, so complete
had been their sisterhood, that they were in pri-
vate to each other " Marion " and "Ida." Now,
the azure eyes of the descendant of Plantagenet
looked with calm, cold regard at her, as though re-
garding a stranger, and, recognising her presence no
more than she would have recognised that of a
beggar, the Lady Clarence Gamelot passed on round
Longchamps.
On Marion Vavasour's lips, which were blanched
to whiteness, the smile was arrested as on the lips
of those suddenly smitten with death ; and while the
smile rested there, into her eyes came a wild, haunt-
ing anxiety as they glanced over the crowd to see
whether this had escaped all others. And as they
glanced they saw cold, pitiless, with the brutal
menace in the eyes and the slight smile about the
mouth, unmoved as though cast in bronze the face
of Strathmore.
He was watching the progress of his work watch-
ing how slowly and surely, drop by drop, his poison
fell.
The throng bore his horse backward ; her carriage
rolled onward with the glittering mass making the
tour of the Bois de Boulogne; and once, twice,
thrice, again and again, the Queen of Fashion was
made to eat of the ashes of the deadly humiliation ;
and the silvered steel thrust its barbed point farther
THE SILVEKED 8TEEL. 125
and farther down into her heart, probing deep to the
core of her secret.
She passed the Countess of Belmaine ; she passed
the Dnchesse de Lurine ; she passed the Marchioness
of Boville ; she passed the Yicomtesse de Buelle ; she
passed her oldest friend, Lady Beaudesert.
And all these dealt her the same blow, one by one,
with the same chill, delicate, unerring weapon; all
these gave her no recognition even of her presence.
The procession of Longchamps, which had ever
been one long triumphal passage for the proud and
dazzling English leader, was one long pilgrimage of
shame, worse than that which, in the centuries gone
by, the barefoot penitents had made by that same
route, when the blind, the sick, and the lame had
thronged to the Abbaye altars, to the grave of Isabelle
Capet.
On many tongues in that dense throng, among
such as could observe it, was but one theme the
insults of her Order to the Marchioness of Vavasour
and Vaux.
But she leaned back, not letting the smile even
grow constrained on her lip, not allowing even a
glance of anxiety in her eyes, a flush of anger on her
cheek; but negligent, graceful, tranquil as of old,
not seeming to have noticed the thrusts which pierced
her to the soul. At last, as her carriage was turned
back to Paris, it passed side by side with the equipage
of the most notorious adventuress of the demi-monde,
126 STRATHMOfiE.
Viola V6, celebrated for ruining a peer of France
every trimestre, and whose extravagances startled
even "equivocal society;" as lier barouche-wheel
locked slightly in that of Lady Vavasour, the Lorette
smiled and bowed, and said a few careless words to
the English Peeress, as though they were of the same
world and the same order! and laughed as her
carriage rolled on, as. one who gives an insult she
knows oasmot be resented.
The open outrage and insolence were translatable
to every looker-on in that dense crowd ; the key to it
was a mystery which convulsed Longchamps with
bewildered amazement, and convulsed Park similarly
in a few hours after. And at this coarse indignity
Marion Vavasour turned white to the very lips, and
trembled exceedingly ; for she was proud, very proud !
and she had had her foot on the neck of this haughty
and patrician world so long, so long ! It was so bitter
to have the diadem: torn from her brow, the sceptre
shattered from her hand!
Once again, as rallying her courage she glanced
around in defiance of the insults, she saw in the
yellow sunlight the face of Strathmore, watching
her with the smile on his lips and the menace in
his eyes, watching her. as the serpent watches the
bird which cannot escape from its fangs. Marion
Vavasour knew, that it was he who had her secret,
and was on her track ; his hand which by the silvered
steel of these women's indignities, dealt her this
poisoned and mortal wound.
THE SILVEBBD STEEL. 127
With all nonchalance, all hauteur, all easy grace,
unchanged, but with her lips blanched and drawn
over her pearly teeth, the most beautiful woman of
her time returned with that slow and glittering pro-
cession from Longchamps to Paris, yelling the quiver-
ing nerves and the throbbing pride with calm courage,
with admirable artifice for she was a more perfect
actress than any the stage has seen. Yet she ran the
gauntlet of a deadly trial ; for in those hours which
that long pageant occupied, in the dense throngs
which fashion gathered, all the eyes of Paris Proper
were on her, and the crowd was divided but into two
classes, those who passed the outrage on her and those
who witnessed it !
As at last she swept up the steps of her own hotel,
she did not observe ;a vagrant woman loitering hard
by on the pavement ; but the Bohemian had watched
there through Kvfelong hours, watched to see her face
as she returned from Longchamps, and a smile came
on Redempta's lips as her vigil was repaid, and she
muttered in Czeschen :
"It is begun. I have not livGd in vain, beloved!
She suffers ! she suffers !"
It was lame she suffered ! Marion Vavasour had
laughed her sweet soft laugh at the mortal agony she
dealt to others, but in her own bitterness she, the
discrowned, who had known no pain and no remorse,
Buffered suffered even as Marie Antoinette when the
xrown was wrenched from her golden head, and the
Dethroned was led out for the gibes of the people.
128 STRATHMOEE.
There was some confusion and agitation in her
household as she crossed the great parquet of the
hall, but not noting it she swept onward up the stair-
case, turning to the groom of the chambers :
"Where is my lord !"
The man hesitated slightly, and looked grave ; she
repeated her question imperiously :
" Where is his lordship t Answer me !"
" Pardon me, my lady, but during your ladyship's
absence his lordship was attacked with a slight
indisposition."
An intense alarm and anxiety came into her face
strange visitants there, for the world had never
known that she had loved her lord I
"Indisposition of what kind? "
" Something I believe of a syncope, my lady."
He was too polite and too elegant a philomath to
use so brief a term as "fit," but her fears grasped his
meaning, and she bade him send the physicians to
her in her boudoir. They came, honeyed and defe-
rential, and from much cream and verbiage the simple
truth gradually oozed that, in plain terms, the Mar-
quis of Vavasour had been struck by apoplexy after
a p&te of nightingales, followed by too many bouchees
and rosolios, at his luncheon, and now lay, sensible
indeed, but in a state most precarious, of which the
issue was doubtful.
Then she dismissed them with a queenly bow of
her graceful head, and signified an imperative neces-
sity that she should see her lord alone on family
THE SILVERED STEEL. 129
matters of the highest moment. The physicians,
curious, like all of their trade, vainly strove to repre-
sent that their presence was indispensable for every
second; all Europe bowed to her will, and she per-
mitted none to gainsay it ; it was obeyed now. His
score of attendants retired from his chamber, and her
husband was alone when she entered it.
With her rich and graceful beauty she came and
stood by the bedside of the sick man, on whose face
death had written its mark out plainly ; and, for he
was quite conscious and had every sense left him, he
opened his eyes and looked at her curiously, for it
were hard to describe the change which had come
over her features, and she wore no mask with him.
She leant over him as she sat beside the couch,
after a few hurried words of condolence, speaking
low and swiftly :
" Vavasour ! All Paris knows it !"
Into the supine face of the old Marquis came a
gleam of malicious amusement crossed with surprise.
"The deuce they do!" he said, with a laboured
articulation. " Who told 'em ? "
"God knows! What matter who!" And she,
whom grief in all its agony, passion in all its fury,
had never moved, save to that gay, triumphant amuse-
ment with which a child crushes its costKest toy,
spoke with breathless agitation, her lips quivering,
her fair hands trembling, her eyes filled with tears
of bitterness ! " They know it ! Even Ida Oamelot
cut me dead an hour ago ; a score of them pd&sed me
VOL. II. k
130 STRATHMOEJE.
as they would pass a dog! And even that woman
V4, Caderousfie's mistress, dared to insult me Me !
They know it i Nothing less could make them act
so, nothing else could give her title with impunity
to "
The sick man chuckled low and with difficulty, as
though this were the best joke which could have come
to cheer him on his death-bed.:
" Gad 1 I wish I had been there! Deuced pity to
have lost it! Eh! bien, ma belle! you can't com-
plain ; you've cheated them a long time 1"
And where he lay back among his pillows he
chuckled still, faintly, for his breath was with diffi-
culty drawn, but with a malicious amusement that
was in ghastly contrast with the marks which death
had set upon his face.
A passionate anger and miseiy gathered in hers:
" And that is all the pity that you "
" Pity ! " hroke in the Marquis, with a laugh which
struggled with a spasm of the breath. " Gad ! the
deuce ! what pity do you want ? You've had your
own way, ma belle, and women love it. I was a
great fool to take your terms, for they were con-
founded high; however, I don't mind it, you've
amused me. It was a drawing-room vaudeville, with
the fun always kept up; but pity 'fore George!
women's ingratitude "
And the Marquis choked with bis disgust at the
ill return which was given him, and with his amuse-
THE SILVERED STEEL. 131
ment at what roused him even from all the apathy of
a moribund.
"But, Vavasour, now now why not now! If
you would, still it might be done privately, secretly;
secresy could be bought, and the world would never
know
She spoke low, tremulously, incoherently, and in
strange agitation for the nattered, courted, proud,
omnipotent beauty! Her hands played nervously
with the lace and silk of the counterpane, where she
leant half kneeling against die bed; her attitude was
almost supplication, and her haughty loveliness was
abased and dejected; for she had worn her diadem
long and proudly, and it was bitter to the Queen of
Fashion to have her sceptre wrenched and her purples
torn aside for all to see the secret of the discrowned.
u Why not aoio, Vavasour V she whispered eagerly,
while her lips were hot and parched. "It would be
so little to you ; it would spare me so much. Now
now, before it is too late ! I can purchase inviolate
secresy "
The dying man interrupted her with his stifled,
laugh rattling in his throat, while his sunk eyes
leered maliciously, and his hand feebly played with
the diamond circlet of her marriage finger die "badge,
she had whispered to Strathmore on the ise4errace
of Vernon9eaux, as the badge of Servitude and
Silence.
" I dare say ! and ma belle veuve would then win,
K2
132 STRATHMOBE.
perhaps, M. D'Etoile, who knows! As it is, she will
have to be only his mistress ! No ! I am not in the
mood! You think one en moribond ought to lend
himself as a lay figure? Ah ! there you are wrong,
ma belle ; you must ask the favour of some one of
your old lovers, that man with the Vandyke face,
who killed his friend for your beaux yeux ; or one of
the new ones, perhaps, may pay the price more gra-
ciously." *
Again the horrid, unfitting laugh, chuckling and
rattling in his throat, sounded through the stillness
of the death-chamber ; Lord Vavasour had eaten his
last p&t6 of nightingales, but he had still palate and
power to enjoy what he and most men with him find
of still sweeter flavour the pleasure of Malice. And
leaning there against the costly draperies of the bed, in
her lace, her jewels, her delicate floating dress which
that day had given out the fashion of the year to
Paris, in her lovely womanhood, in her haughty grace,
Marion Lady Vavasour who wore no mask with him
sank forwards, thinking nothing of her husband be-
fore her, but with her white hands clenched, her teeth
set tight, her fair face blanched, her rich hair pushed
back in its masses from her temples, eating in all
their bitterness of the ashes of Humiliation, tasting
in all their cruelty the death-throes of Abdication.
133
CHAPTER XII.
THE ERRAND OP THE LOST.
The household was hushed, all moved with noise-
less footsteps through the wide marble staircase and
the stately corridors and the brilliant-lighted cham-
bers of the Hotel Vavasour : the presence of death
was nigh, and breathed its solemnity even through
the gilded halls and the pompous hirelings of that
magnificent palace, where wit was usually as rife as
in the salons of Rambouillet, and cost was as un-
heeded in luxury or dissipation as in the days of
Vitellius. It was known that his lordship could not
recover, and that, Vitellius-like, his goblet was re-
versed and his last Falernian was drunk, and the
Praetorian Guards of Pallida Mors were leading him
out, stripped of his purples, and made nothing better
or greater than an old, bloated, gluttonous man, to
hurl him over the fathomless abyss, where none would
134 STRATHMORE.
mourn him, and down the dark, cold river whence
none return.
The household was still and awed through this early
part of the spring night, and his wife sat in her own
chamber, when her dinner had been served and dis-
missed, musing and alone. From custom she had
dressed for the evening, as habitual, and the delicate
shower of costly lace fell about her, and the diamonds
and amethysts sparkled in her hair as she sat there,
her head leaning on her arm, her lips white and
pressed together, her fair proud brow knit in vain
thought thought how to baffle, how to escape from
the vengeance which netted her in and held her tight
beneath its stifling meshes.
Only five-and-twenty years had passed over her
head, and she must lay down the sceptre, and put the
crown from off her brows, and pass from the haut
pas and the throne, to mingle with the jeered and
common crowd. Already! already! She must leave
her kingdom in her youth. She had known that
sooner or later this must come, that sooner or later
this shame and bitterness must fall; but in the
royalty of her omnipotence, the gladness of her
power, she had forgotten her doom. She had be-
lieved that it would come, perhaps at some far distant
time, when her beauty was spent, and when in age it
would matter but little ; nay, she had at last believed
that so happily had fortune favoured her, that her
life would flow on for ever in the sunlight, and that
she would live and die in the honour and odour of
THE EKttABD OP THE LOST. 135
the patrician world she ruled, her secret never
guessed, and buried with her in the grave which
would bear die name and titles of Marion Marchioness
of Vavasour and Vaux*
And now now in the brilliance of her youth, in
the splendour of her triumphs, the stroke had fallen ;
and she must go out, to be the jibe, the mockery, the
scorn, of her rivals and her foes.
The dews stood on her brow, her hands clenched
in her anguish, she shivered and started from her
solitary reverie it was so horrible! to stoop her
pride into the dust; to be banned for ever from
the haughty, shadowless, patrician life she loved;
to be the scorn and the derision of the women
she had outshone and outrivalled, and made follow
the mere fashion of her drapery, the mere mode that
her changing caprice gave as law.
She started and rose to her feet, and there was a
piteous misery in the eyes ere this so proud, so lus-
trous, so full of careless laughter : she had known no
mercy for others, but she knew suffering for herself.
As she rose, her lace caught in and overturned a gold
filigree basket filled with the notes which had come
during the past twenty-four hours; one rested, as
the shower fell, upon her dress, and mechanically she
raised it and broke the envelope ; they were only a few
lines in French, bearing the date of the previous day r
u Madame, Lord Cecil Strathmore has some
secret of your past, with which he intends to take
136 STRATHMOEE.
his vengeance on you to-morrow, in the sight of
Paris. I know no more than this, which I gathered
from what I accidentally and unavoidably overheard
between him and Madame de Kuelle this morning.
I acquaint you, that if you deem fit you may seek to
avert what seems to threaten indignity, or worse, to
you, and I am willing to answer to him for having
done so. In this I render you good for evil, but, as
you know but too well, I have loved you more faith-
fully than most.
" Veuillez agrder Madame, F assurance de ma conside-
ration distingute.
" Falconbebg."
That note she should have received the night
before ; and it had lain there in the jewelled basket
unnoticed, while the Queen of Fashion had gone out
to meet her doom. She, sceptical of all else, believed
in that hour in Destiny and Retribution ; the writer
was an Austrian, a mere boy in years, whose young
life the beautiful panther had torn and destroyed for
a night's amusement, a coquette's triumph, at one of
the gorgeous masked balls of the Viennese Court:
and while she read her lips quivered and her hand
shook as it clenched upon the paper.
It told her no more than her fears had known
before than the cold and pitiless face she had seen
that day had told her without words.
"Poor Falconberg, poor child I" she murmured
consciously, for in triumph we cast aside human
THE EEEAND OF THE LOST. 137
tenderness, but in despair we value it. " His mercy
his! As soon seek pity from marble, warmth
from ice ! As soon ask the vulture not to tear, the
lion not to rend !"
And she sat there with the pallor of terror blanch-
ing her lovely lips, which trembled as with cold:
she knew 'that more hopeless than to seek mercy
from the beasts of prey was it to seek compassion
from the hand which her love and her lie had dyed
with blood.
And yet and yet her eyes fell on her own love-
liness. It had bent him as the wind the reeds; it
had melted him as the flames the steel. Might its
ancient power not be wholly fled ? could he who had
been her abject slave gaze on it wholly unmoved 1
Up from the dread of a great despair grew the sickly
shadow of a vain hope, side by side with the mad
impulse of an unconsidered resolve. She was s used
to her sovereign sway, her proud omnipotence re-
sistance to her prayer seemed a thing impossible.
And hastily, and on the instinct of a misery which
made death from his hand look better to be coveted
than the living chastisement to which he doomed her,
she arose nerved to a hopeless and desperate pur-
pose.
Late that night Marion Vavasour entered a little
brougham by one of the side-doors of her own re-
sidence, and was driven rapidly through the few
streets which parted her from the Hotel de Londres.
138 STBATHHOKEL
The carriage was hired, die driver a stringer, and she
herself was enveloped in long, black, sweeping folds,
which concealed her person, while a thick black veil
thrown over her head wholly obscured her features.
Etoile himself might have passed her at his elbow
and never penetrated her disguise ; those who would
have died for one smile from her eyes would not have
recognised her in that veiled and sombre form.
The driver stopped at the hotel, and came to the
door for instructions.
tt Inquire if Lord Cecil Strathmore be visible I "
The man obeyed, and ten minutes after returned.
" Milord is within, madame, but they doubt if he
will be seen so late.*
u Very well, let me out."
She descended from her carriage,, and entered the
hotel. A few moments' conversation with one of the
attendants, two louis d'or slipped into his hand, and she
followed him up the staircase, along the corridors, and
towards the door of one of the great suites.
"Your card, madame."
She handed him one, cm which was printed a name,
but not her own, and the servant entered the apart-
ment leaving her without, but with the door not
wholly closed, so that where she stood she could hear
his voice, and that of the one who replied to him.
u A lady entreats milord to see her for a few mo-
ments t"
" The ' Countess Lena ! ' I do not know the name ;
and what an hour ! However, show her in "
THE EEEA&D OF THE LOST. 139
The man returned, threw the door wide open,
ushered her ceremoniously into the salon, and retired,
closing the door behind him. He presumed this
veiled midnight guest, whose voice thrilled him like
sweet musk, came from the Br6da Quartier, and
envied the Englishman who received her.
The door closed, and Marion Vavasour was alone
with Strathmore. He rose as she entered, standing
under the full light of the chandelier which glittered
immediately above his head.
" Madame, may I ask to what fortunate chance I
am indebted for this honour? "
As the calm, chill, courtly tones, addressing her as
a stranger, fell on her ear, she shivered could that
suave, gentle, immutable voice ever soften to pardon,
to mercy ! She was silent, pausing in the centre of
the chamber ; and he moydd a fauteuil towards her.
"Be seated, madame. I await your pleasure."
She did not take the chair; she did not answer;
and Strathmore, marvelling if his veiled visitant were
dumb, awaited her pleasure leaning his arm on the
marble console while the light was shed on the pecu-
liar Vandyke type of his features, with the dark
gleam of his fathomless eyes under their drooped lids,
and the cold straight line of the calm brows. She
looked at him and shuddered, for she knew the fierce
passions which lay beneath his high-bred and courtly
suavity; she knew the steel gauntlet which was
covered with that delicate, velvet, broidered glove of
a courtier's manner. All the courage which had
140 STRATHMORE.
brought her hither on a mad impulse failed ; the last
time that she had been within his reach his hand had
been upon her throat seeking her life ! She sickened
and shuddered with the memory of that ghastly hour,
that awful torture, when death had been so nigh ;
noting how she trembled, this stranger, this veiled
woman, Strathmore approached her gently.
" Have no disquietude, madame. If I can assist
you, command me."
" Strathmore, you can spare me ! "
The words rang out almost with a shriek ; and as
the words smote on his ear, he staggered back, and a
spasm passed over his face as at some wound suddenly
dealt by a keen knife.
His passion was not dead because it had changed
to hate ; nay, hate rioted in him because, though love
abhorred her, love still craved her. For this woman
had been to him sovereign, conscience, world, heaven,
all that life can hold all that eternity can offer !
A moment, and he conquered himself ; he held in
an iron rein every emotion which could betray him ;
his face grew chill and passionless, as though it were
cut in stone ; he looked on her, as he had looked in
the Tuileries, as he had looked in the sunlight of the
past day, and was silent.
He had trained himself to see her thus without a
sign, that he might watch her suffer ; and she might
sooner have wrung tears from a cast of bronze, a
moan from a statue of marble, than mercy or weak-
ness from him.
THE ERRAND OP THE LOST. 141
" You can spare me, Strathmore ! "
The words rang but hoarse in their bitter supplica-
tion ; cold and tranquil his answered her.
"lean."
" And you will you will ? "
For all reply he smiled ; and that slight smile, as
it passed over his face where the gaslight fell white
upon it, was more pitiless than any speech which could
have condemned her.
A faint cry broke from her lips as she saw it ; she
cast from her the trammels of her heavy sweeping
cloak, and flung back the black lace which shrouded
her like a Spanish mantilla. Her loveliness was once
more before him, unveiled, in all its brilliance, the
light streaming down upon her face with its glittering
hair and its lovely youth, the sapphires flashing in her
snowy bosom, the perfumed lace, half falling off, half
trailing round, the divine grace of her voluptuous
form. And she stood silent, her head drooped, her
eyes soft with lustrous tears, her bosom heaving with
its voiceless sobs, the light falling full upon her.
This beauty had been omnipotent to tempt him once,
to cast aside all laws of God and Man this beauty
might tempt him yet again. This had stricken his
strength till it was a reed within her hands this
again might give her back her power. And she stood
there, while her eyes looked up to his, and her heart
heaved where the jewels gleamed; and the lace
sank farther down down from off her beautiful
shoulders, with the diamonds glittering where they
142 BTRATHMOKE.
nestled in her breast. Bat his will was iron; Ms
veins were ice f or her ; and his eyes did not change,
his smile did not alter, as his words fen cold and
clear on the silence.
" It is too late for that J n
A burning flush crimsoned ner face, and she shrank
under the blow. She was a woman, and one who
glossed her amours with delicate refinement, and one
who was used to rule omnipotent, and yield with a
sovereign's grace not to sue and be repulsed. Tears,
genuine and bitter, started to ber eyes, and her voice
thrilled with passionate emotion.
u Strathmorel Strathmore ! I am in your power
spare me ! I am a woman be pitiful to me ! You
loved me so well once have some pardon for me now!"
He did not change his attitude ; be leaned there
against the console, with his eyes, under their drooped
lids, fixed on her ; and his words answered her, fall-
ing low and chill on the silence, Eke the dropping of
ice-water :
a I marvel you dare say that to me 1 Go ! you were
always a matchless actress ; it is a pity to waste your
time, your tempting, and your loveliness l w
She shivered as she heard him : from fiery pas-
sion, from menace, from reproaches, she would have
hoped to win, to touch, to tempt, to torture him
into some mercy. With those cold, measured, inflex-
ible tones, all hope died out. She felt as those who,
gliding down into a bottomless abyss upon the Alps,
THE EREAND OF THE LOST. 143
feel the ice-wall they strive to grasp, slide, smooth,
and frozen, and shelving from their touch, as they
sink downwards to darkness and to death.
With a low cry she threw herself at his feet in all
her soft abandonment of supplication; her proud
head humbled to the dust before him; her white
hands wrung and clenched; her loveliness, thrown
there before him like a criminal's who kneels before
her judge.
And he looked down cm her unmoved, save that
has vengeance was dear to him, and sweet: she suf-
fered at last I
a Strathmore! Oh, God ! see, I kneel to you ; J,
who never bent to any mortal thing ! I may merit
this from you ; I do not dare to deny it. You may
have much to avenge on me much J though I
loved you ; ay, I loved you as I have loved no other !
Women crave conquest, power, eruefey ; but we love,
despite that love, though we love ourselves first !
If I sinned to you, I sinned for you I 9
a True ! It is the trade of the conrtesan ! "
Where she lay at his feet, prostrate in her loveli-
ness and her abasement, she shuddered under the calm,
chill, brutal sneer she ! the woman who had ruled over
princes, and to whom kings had knelt! Yet she would
not renounce all hope, she would not give way from
all effort: she lifted her head, so that the white light
fell on its lustrous hair, and shone in her lovely eyes,
with their appealing prayer; and that face, in its
144 STEATHMOBE.
blanched pain, its prostrate beauty, its stricken pride,
was more resistless than in its most radiant hour of
witching sovereignty.
" Shame me ! humble me ! strike me as you will !
I wronged you, and I am in your power, and a
woman, and defenceless! Yet hear me: be great
enough to forego vengeance be noble enough to
heap coals of fire on my head by Pardon. If I
erred, were you sinless ? If I were guilty, were you
stainless from crime ? See ! you have made me
drink the bitterness of humiliation to the .dregs!
Cannot that content you ? Spare me, more for the
love of God! Hear me, Strathmore, and have
mercy ! To-day you have let the world whisper it,
but to-morrow's whisper may soon efface to-da/s.
Lord Vavasour is dying, dying fast; let me bear
his name in peace f If you do not reveal the truth
to his heirs, none will dare attack, and sift, and
search none will raise/ the question. I may live
in peace; live without shame, and sneer, and jibe
from the women I have rivalled, from the society
I have ruled. Only spare me this this ! Do not
hunt me down to poverty and degradation, do not
expose me to the world ! "
She stopped, and a sob choked her voice, for
here, if acting still, the actress felt her part and
pleaded her prayer in all its acrid bitterness, its keen,
imploring pain, for she felt and pleaded for herself.
She suffered, she suffered, and the burning tears
gathered and fell, and under its delicate shroud of
THE ERRAND OP THE LOST. 145
lace her form shivered with the x physical cold of a
great dread, of a convulsive suspense.
She pleaded as the Condemned plead for life.
Her future lay in this man's keeping and he had
spared her from death only to bid her live "to
suffer."
She had made him in God's sight and in his own
a murderer. Could she hope for mercy from himf
Could she strike vengeance from his hand ?
A death-like stillness reigned between them as her
voice ceased, and she lay there at his feet in her abject
supplication, her abased loveliness, her stricken pride.
He stood changeless, motionless, his face unaltered in
its tranquillity, his eyes unfaltering in their relentless
gaze:
" If you were drowning before my eyes, and my
hand stretched out could save you you should perish
in its need ! If you were bound to the stake, and
one word of mine could save you I would not speak
it ! If you were dying of hunger and thirst, and a
cup of cold water from my pity could save you
I would refuse it in your death hour! I have
answered. Such mercy as you gave, I give to you ;
no other."
As his words fell slowly out upon the silence,
chill, tranquil, and inexorable as Fate, a shudder
ran through her frame, and a cry broke from 'her
lips wild and piteous, like that of a woman who re-
ceives her death-warrant.
She trembled, shivered, shrank before the iron
VOL. II. L
146 STRATHMORE.
pitilessness, the icy hate, of this man's nature, on
which her own might fling, and wear, and spend
itself for ever, yet make no more impress than the
fretting waves which break upon a granite sea-wall,
and leave no sign of all their feverish travail. And
she lay crouched at his feet in all her fallen loveli-
ness, stricken and paralysed as by a cruel mortal
blow.
His eyes dwelt on her long and meaningly, while
not a muscle of his face changed from its rigid calm,
its bitter exultation; he watched her shudder, and
writhe, and crouch there at his feet with a faint
smile playing on his lips as he would have watched
her strained on the rack or bound to her funeral pyre ;
and his voice hissed slowly through his teeth as he
stooped and whispered in her ear:
a Listen ! I have what you can never rob me of I
have my Vengeance. You have lived to suffer!
And you will fall lower and lower into sin and infamy,
and misery and want ; fall as those fall who trade in
beauty, and die as they die when beauty leaves them :
die in the streets die craving a crust. Go! your
fate waits for you."
The brutal doom hissed in her ear, maddened her
as a shot a panther, till all its desert nature wakes to
life under its pain. She started, and uprose and stood
before him, her face blanched to the lips her eyes
alight with a tigress^glare, fearful in her loveliness,
ghastly in her brilliance, dangerous in her weakness
and her despair.
THE EBBAND OP THE LOST. 147
"Abase me, expose me, destroy me, work your
worst ; I plead no more 1 But, by the God whom
we have both outraged, the hour shall come when the
mercy you mete out to me I will mete back to you,
when you shall seek in Tain of earth or heaven,
Strathmore, for the pity you now deny !"
She stood before him in all her beauty, while the
light streamed down upon her, her face turned towards
him with the glittering hair thrown back, her lustrous
eyes dilated, her form instinct with despairing pas-
sion, her voice rising and quivering in the air till it
rang with a menace of the future, with evil dark
and merciless as his own; she stood there, terrible
as Ate^ prophetic as Cassandra. And thus they
looked on one another, this man and woman,, so lately
bound in the close ties of passionate love and mutual
sin, now sundered farther than they betwixt whom
oceans rolL Thus they looked on. one another; and
in .her eyes was the lurid gleam of a vengeance
which soon or late would pioneer its path and sate
its lust; and on his lips sat the calm, chill smile
of a vengeance which would never cease from pur-
suing, and never stay its hand for pity or for prayer,
which held its quarry in its grip, and tasted its power
slowly, drop by drop, with thirst which grew the
greater with its every draught.
Thus they looked on one another; there was a
moment's silence again, as though she still mutely
awaited whether yet he would not yield to mercy, yet
abstain from vengeance, and bid her go, loathed,
l2
148 8TRATHM0RE.
abhorred, condemned, but spared. There was a
moment's silence, in which the very air seemed plead-
ing for her pardon, and supplicating for the God-like
vengeance of forgiveness. Then she cast one look
upon his face : it was white, calm, chill, inflexible as
the features of the dead, and unmoved as they
to prayer, or woe, or menace ; and without word or
sign she turned and left his presence.
They had parted
And, as the door closed, he fell heavily forward,
with a crash, across the marble, weeping a woman's
very passion of tears; loathing life, longing for
death, abhorring himself while his heart was breaking.
He had loved her so utterly ; he loved her still !
To her he had been as granite, but in his heart he
was so weak. His vengeance had so much guilt, but
his life had so much misery.
" Oh God, I grow a fiend ! " he moaned in his
great wretchedness, his added crime. u Oh God,
why did they not kill me in my birth ? "
149
CHAPTER XIH.
THE COBE OP THE SECRET.
At twelve that night, while Lord Vavasour lay
dying, and Paris danced and supped, and gamed and
laughed, and whirled through the merry hours, a
party of some dozen or so were gathered after the
opera for a petit souper in the salons of Madame de
la Ferriole, the wife of one of those princes whom the
Bourse makes in a day. The hotel was superb ; the
ameublement would have been deemed marvellous in
a palace ; figuratively, for its cost, the supper could
boast of liquid gold for its wines, and melted gold for
its dishes; and the S&vres on which it was served
was rimmed with pink pearls: yet Madame de la
Ferriole (genuinely, Madame le Maire) was still on
the outskirts of fashionable society, and was at this
moment still passing through that transmigratory
period which transfers the owners of Capital among
the leaders of Ton; and blazons the Or with the
/
150 STBATHMOBE.
Gules. She moved highly, but not with the highest,
and therefore her guests around the supper-table dis-
cussed the insult of Longchamps without the key to
it, which as yet only lay in the hands of the ultra
exclusives of one certain set; and, therefore, they
hailed with pleasure and empressement the late advent
of the single member of that set whom they had yet
secured, and who had deigned to come and sup with
Madame de la Ferriole, partly because, en vraie
Parisienne, she respected the wealth, partly because,
en bel esprit, she wished to satirise the appointments
of the roturi&re. That single member was Blanche
de Ruelle.
With all the " languor of good tone," but with all
the curiosity of scandal-mongers, the party around
the millionnaire's supper-table sought the confidence
of the haughty and unapproachable aristocrat, who,
lying back and slowly breaking her ioe, seemed dis-
posed to talk of little but the new opera, and of that
only to her own escort, the Vicomte de Chanrellan.
Blanche de Euelle had been the first to wham Strath-
mare had entrusted the secret of Marion Vavasour's
downfal, and bidden deal the poisoned wound with
the silver steel ; she had been the chief to enable him
to mete out revenge and chastisement thus slowly,
subtilely, witheringly. And although he in unfold-
ing, she in receiving the story had placed but one
motive in sight and surface to wit, the proud wrath
of an insulted Order, and an outraged and patrician
Matronage ; the chastisement had been the more wil-
THE CORE OF THE SECRET. 151
lingly, the more completely done because she had
once loved hopelessly where the woman whose
abasement she was summoned to carry out had been
madly worshipped. The same passions move the
world as in older and more transparent days; they
are but the more closely veiled.
And now, about the supper-table of La Ferriole,
little else but one topic was circulated, if abandoned
for the moment, to be resumed the next; and the
bored, languid, slander-seeking flaneurs, masculine
and feminine, lounging away an hour after the opera
over the priceless wines of the Princess of the Bourse,
sought its explanation from the first of those who had
dealt the deadly thrust that day in the green allees of
the Bois. For the insult to the English Peeress was
the theme of Paris; and the high station of those
who had passed it raised curiosity to frantic wonder
and to breathless impatience. Blanche de Ruelle let
them babble on about it in her presence, while she
spoke of Auber^s music with Chanrellan; then she
raised her haughty eyes in answer to the questions
which turned directly towards her, playing gently
with her Spanish fan.
" Pardon, madame ! Lady Vavasour ? Oh, I pray
you drop that subject ; society has been grossly out-
raged, foully insulted. Have you not heard? Jn-
deed! Why, the marriage was fictitious she was
never his wife. The world has been deceived, and
we we have received the Marquis's mistress."
152
CHAPTER XIV.
THE ABDICATION OF THE PUBPLES.
At twelve of the night the Marquis of Vavasour
and Vaux died, and his chaplain, standing by, said
unctuously over the bloated body, "Blessed are the
chosen who die in the Lord;" for he whose breath
had just left his body had had many and rich bene-
fices in his hand, and " died in the Lord," according
to all the clergy of the Church of England, which
sees no sins in patrons.
"Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!" and the good
chaplain, having said the Last Communion over the
past Marquis, went to send the first telegram to the
future one. But, rapid as was his own, one had pre-
ceded it to the distant Jieir, who, from a nameless
Attach^, would become a Personage. Where the
two passions race, Revenge will outstrip Avarice of
the two, though both are hell-hounds fleet of foot.
This latter message ran thus :
THE ABDICATION OP THE PUEPLES. 153
"From the Lord Cecil Strathmore, Hotel de Londres,
Paris, to William Vere-Lucingham, Esq., British
Embassy, Constantinople.
" I hear the Marquis, your cousin, died to-night,
suddenly and intestate. See me here as soon as you
arrive, or you will lose the best part of the personalty."
Now, in the absence of all will of any kind, since
the Marquis had ever had obstinate horror of a testa-
ment, and shunned the word of death as utterly as the
Romans on their tombstones, the entail devolved on
Vere-Lucingham, sole, though distant, heir presump-
tive, and all the rich personalty would go to his
widowed Marchioness. Therefore, when this telegram
came to him with his morning coffee, acquainting
him of the new fortiines which Pallida Mors, best
friend of the Living, had wrought for him, the young
Attach^ was bewildered at its latter clause; but
knowing well the character of the sender, for he had
been under him at Turin, never thought of slighting
or neglecting the strange summons, but only felt a
grateful and wondering eagerness as to its purport.
At twelve of the night the Marquis of Vavasour
and Vaux died of too much p&te de rossignol and
rosolios at luncheon not a great death, perhaps, but
in the main scarce so harmful an one (to others) as
Mithridates' or Hamilcays, or Julius Caesar's, or
divers whom we call heroes, because they perished
by a weapon with which they had slain thousands ere
their decease, and slew by their legacies thousands
154 STBATHMOBE.
after it. To be gluttonous of nightingales is bad ;
but it may be worse for the unirerse to be gluttonous
of nations ; a gourmet only kills himself ; a hero fills a
larger bill of mortality. The one, however, has only
the restaurants, the other the world, to chant his Be
Profunda; and, granted, it is murder on a larger scale
to kill ten thousand men to make a victory, than to
kill ten dozen birds to make a pate !
The Marquis of Vavasour and Vaux died, and left
the world a legacy of many inimitable cuisine receipts,
and one great wonder. His young cousin, Vere-
Lucingham, succeeded to the Marquisate with all its
honours, and refusing to acknowledge Iter claim to
one iota of the rich property which the law would
have allotted to the wife o the deceased, to one
gem of the Vavasour jewels which had so long
sparkled on her brow, the new peer proclaimed to
Europe that she whom it had so long received and
honoured had no right or title to its respect and
homage, but had only been the dead man's mistress.
And when the charge was brought, the condemned
could put forward no defence, could allege no denial:
there had been no marriage ; and the Law is not to
be seduced by a feminine sophism, dazzled by an
actress, or enslaved by a woman's loveliness, but
wrings out one uncourtly, and coarse thing truth.
She, whom the world so long had known and wor-
shipped as Marion Lady Vavasour, had kept her
secret well. Who says that her sex has not the power
to guard a secret closely? Pshaw! they keep one
THE ABDICATION OP THE PUEPLES. 155
for a life-time, if their own ! She had kept it,
secure that it would never be told by her lord, and
that when he died, with him would die the sole pos-
sessor of it. And now the secret was given to the
winds, and hurled out to the light of the day, and flung
to the world where she reigned, as the deer is flung
to the hounds at the cur^e! For the hell-dogs of
Vengeance had been on her track, and they never
lose scent of the trail*
Years before, cruising among the West Indian
Isles, and lying in a harbour (rarely visited) to have
his yacht fresh coppered, the Marquis had seen her,
lovely as the morning. Her parents, English planters,
were dead, and she was fretting at, and wearied of
colonial obscurity and insular imprisonment, like a
brilliant tropic bird in a cooped-up cage. She looked
at her marvellous loveliness, and knew that while it
could give her sway wider and mightier than the
Caesars', it must bloom to its full beauty, and fade
and die unseen, like the radiant blossoms of some
matchless flower in the tangled forests and dense
swamps of her own island. The Marquis saw her,
loved her, and offered her the world. She knew,
by intuition in her lovely youth, how great a price
such beauty as hers should fetch, and refused to sell
it for less than his coronet. He declined the pay-
ment : she declined any other. A pause ensued, in
which both steeled themselves from surrender, and
each awaited the other's capitulation. At last the
man grew impatient, the woman doubtful : he was
156 STBATHMOBE.
lured by her loveliness, she was lured by the vista of
emancipation and conquest which stretched out before
her ; they each bent to a compromise. She dispensed
with the legalities of marriage, but stipulated for the
semblance ; she did not require to be made his wife,
but she required that the world should hold her so : he,
well amused to joliment jouer son monde, and, musing
that (unbound) he could end the comedy whensoever
he should have fatigued of it, consented.
She came to Europe with him as the Marchioness
of Vavasour and Vaux: it suited his monkeyish
malice to play the trick on his order and on society,
and he readily lent himself to all which might best
sustain the delusion. She was received as his wife
and the rest was soon accomplished by her own un-
equalled beauty and unrivalled tact. She soon ruled
the fashion, and set her foot on the neck of the
world. And as time went on the old Marquis grew
so well accustomed to her reign, and was so well
amused to see society fall before her and men go mad
for her loveliness, that he abandoned all thought of
dissolving their compact ; partially perhaps because he
did not care to tell the world himself that he had
palmed off a lie upon it, partially because his own
weak and supine character had shown its facile points
to her, and was ruled by her stronger will with
facility, and without his being even aware of the
governance. Thus what she appeared to the world
she grew absolutely to regard herself.
Worshipped, courted, obeyed as the Marchioness
THE ABDICATION OP THE PUBPLES. 157
of Vavasour and Vaux, she forgot that she had no
legal claim to the title and place she filled. One or
two obscure persons in that remote, uncivilised West
Indian island were all who knew her secret; how
should these reach her great world, or her great
world reach them? Moreover, they were in her pay,
and bribed to silence; so it was little marvel that
Marion Vavasour such I must still call her deemed
her position secure and her single secret safe from
revelation; little marvel that, proud, made to love
power and to use it royally, haughtily fastidious as
though a born patrician, with some blood of an ille-
gitimate Stuart actually wandering in her veins, and
accustomed to the homage of exclusive circles, she
had learned to look upon her rank as unassailable,
and felt the degradation of her deadly fate bitterly,
bitterly as any queen, who with her crown torn
from her Brows, and her purples rent from about her,
ever was bidden to descend from her throne and
come out to the jibes and the hiss of the multitude
where yesterday the highest sought her smile, where
to-day the lowest could revile and scoff and stone!
Strathmore's vengeance would have been more mer-
ciful if he had slain her in the glare of that summer
morning a moment's pain, and all had then been
over. He had chosen a more lingering and cruel
retribution : he had bade her live to suffer.
Her secret was known in Paris, and nothing of the
bitterness of her humiliation was spared to the Dis-
crowned. She had outshone the one sex, she had
158 STRATHMOBE.
maddened the other ; who was there amidst the order
she had insulted, the women she had rivalled, the
men she had fooled, to break the violence of her fall,
to heed how brutally the diadem might be wrenched
from the fair, proud head, raised in its lovely sove-
reignty so long above them 1
Her secret was known in Paris : in the cercles, in
the salons, in the Tnileries itself, in Galignani's, on
the Boulevards ; in all the caf s, in all the boudoirs,
over fine ladies' chocolate in their bedrooms, over
gourmets' five hundred francs' breakfast in the
Maison Doree, it was the theme of the hour, to the
exclusion of all eke; it flew across the Channel as
swiftly as special correspondents' copy could reach
Printing-house-square, and filled all the journals,
Anglo and Gallic, with its startling sensation-news,
its incredible scandal. All Europe knew this beauti-
ful Helen, with the antelope eyes, for whom princes
and chiefs had been ready to war, almost as in the
old days of Hellas. All Europe was summoned as
witness and auditor of her shame and her abdication.
From the Palace to the Press all Europe arraigned
her and for what mercy could she look in her
abasement, when those who found her guilty were
the nobility she had insulted, the society she had
trepanned, the rivals she had humiliated, the lovers
she had fooled? These made judges more pitiless
than Alva's Council of Blood.
True, for sake of her loveliness many asylums
offered to her, in terms which now she could not
THE ABDICATION OF THE PUBPLES. 159
resent as insult, and of them she accepted Etoile's.
But the protection of a Prince was almost as bitter
to her as the obscurity of a convent she who had
reigned in the palaces of Europe to be classed with
Yiol& Y, she who had shone amidst women of blood
royal and visited at St. Cloud and at Windsor to
sink amidst lionnes of the Rue Br6da and Enghien
toy-villas I It was a bitter change from the purples
of the Patrician to the stained robes of the Hetira.
She suffered ay ! she suffered cruelly, this woman,
who had mocked at all human grief with her silvery
laugh, and dealt out anguish and death as gaily as a
child deals both to the painted butterflies that he
slays for his sport. She suffered cruelly ; for to the
proud and flattered woman there was no chastisement
so fearful as humiliation* And it was a scourge of
scorpions wherewith he lashed her he, whose hand,
though unseen, dealt every blow under which she
shrank.
With the keen cunning and the patience in pur-
suit, of her vagrant race, the Bohemian had learned
the secret of the aristocrat from a quadroon woman
whom she had found, by what chain of hazard and
investigation combined,, matters not In her hands it
was powerless for evil a gipsy could not be heard
against a peeress ; but she placed it in those which
her shrewd intuition knew would use it most widely,
most mercilessly. When Strathmore had taken his
yacht, as it was believed, to the Western world, he
had gone to pursue every link of the clue given him
160 STRATHMORE.
by the Czeschen, in that remote unnoticed colony
whence the first thread of his vengeance had to be
found. It had needed long and patient search ; those
he sought were obscure and unknown ; but he was
patient in the trail as an Indian, and when his gold
had bought over their silence and purchased their
fidelity to the secret they had in keeping, his ven-
geance was his. He had returned to deal it his
hand invisible, but his will directing its every step,
its every sting.
With his revelation he had bought opprobrium and
chastisement for her from the highest ; with his gold
he bought insult and degradation for her from the
lowest. As it had been his intimation which had
caused the patrician women to cut her dead in the
passage of Longchamps, so it had been his will
which had caused the'lorette to greet her familiarly
in the allee of the Bois so it was his wealth which
purchased every subtle indignity, every suave out-
rage which, by a cool word or an insolent smile from
those in whom womanhood is disgraced, classed her
with them, and struck deeper than a dagger's thrust
into the heart which, with all its sin, with all its
licence, remained haughty, fastidious, refined, aristo-
cratic to its core. A laugh, a note, a bow, the point-
ing of the monstrari digito, the shame of coarse
epigram, or sneering quatrain, or obscene caricatura,
the insult of courtesans' friendship, or courtesans'
invitation these were the weapons with which the
unseen hand that dealt her doom, stabbed her mo-
THE ABDICATION OF THE PUEPLES. 161
mentarily, mercilessly, with a retribution as subtle as
it was relentless. He had bade her live to suffer!
It environed her, it pursued her, it poisoned the very
air she breathed; she grew exhausted under it,
this unending vengeance, which never slacked its
speed, which never slaked its thirst, which, in its
subtlety and its power, seemed all but supernatural.
My brethren, are not men's passions ever so when
they break the bonds of nature, and trample wide the
mercy which God yields, but they deny?
He had bade her live to suffer ; and she did suffer,
this woman, whom no remorse had ever touched, no
pity stirred, no tenderness stricken, but who had
pride, which suffered deadly agony in its fall. There
is a torture of the spirit which is more devilish and
more terrible to endure than the shorter and coarser
torture of the body ; and she she who had reigned
so long ! knew this to its uttermost. She knew it
when the men-servants of a household which had
used to be obedient to her slightest gesture, could
revenge themselves for many an imperious word or
haughty command, by the slight and the sneer which
the hirelings of the fresh lord had no scruple to deter
them from offering to the mistress of the dead. She
knew it when the women whom she had scored from
her visiting list as beneath her rank, or refused to
enter on her invitation-roll as roturieres or rococo,
could pay her back in whatever coin they would.
She knew it when she stood alone, a queen dis-
VOL. II. M
162 STEATHMOBE.
crowned, in the chambers where she had so long
reigned absolute with a crowding court about her,
and looked down the long vista of the magnificent
salons, where yesterday every art-4rifle had been
hers, every will had bent to hers, every guest, every
servant, ay ! even every picture on the walls, or jewel
in the tazze, or flower in the conservatories, had been
hers, and whence now, she passed out with less
honour than the lowest hireling who moved about
their chambers, with less right, or title, or share in
them than the dogs which slept upon their cushions.
The shame of a great sin had never smitten her ;
she knew it not; but under the shame of a great
abasement she writhed, she shrank, she shuddered,
as the women of old, who were given over, naked
and bleeding, and hooted, to the pillory and the
scourge. Is she alone? Surely not, for with man-
kind it is not the crime which is dreaded, but the
scaffold.*
The Due d'Etoile's carriage awaited her on that
day when she passed for ever from the residence and
the state of the Marchioness of Vavasour and Vaux.
She entered it, sweeping through the great crowd,
which assembled to gaze upon her aa a notoriety, with
all her accustomed haughty grace, now with a shade
of defiance in it, and with her teeth slightly set
together, for henceforth the world and she were at
* " Le crime fait la honte et non pas l'e'chafaud," says Corneille.
But the world reverses the poet's dictum ; and in the world's eyes and
our own, we may sin as we please, provided we avoid the scandal of
being gibbeted for it !
THE ABDICATION OF THE PUEPLES. 163
issue, and would contemn and confront each other.
But this was only for the world ; alone, the fallen
empress bowed undo* the bitterness of her degrada-
tion, and writhed as upon a wheel where she was
chained for public gaze and public mockery, as the
carriage rolled onward to the Due's villa; Etoile
was not with her some court ceremony detained him
at the Tuileries, and he had written that he cotdd not
be at Auteuil "jusqu'au souper,." in a note, in whose
rich compliment already she learned the difference of
a Prince's wording to a Peeress of England, and to
one of Viola Ve's Sisterhood. She needed the soli-
tude ; she was thankful for it. Away from the eyes
of the crowd, or from the presence of her lovers,
Marion Vavasour's high-strung spirit gave way, like
a bow overbent. She who had looked on all pain as
her sport, as the young cat claims the agonies of the
dying bird for her play, she knew it now for herself.
She was alone ; on her arrival the chambers seemed
stifling, the very evidences of a prince's wealth pre-
pared for her looked loathsome ; they were the in-
signia of her fall. She needed to suffer in solitude
once once for henceforth she would be amongst
those whose wealth lies in their smiles, whose liveli-
hood hangs on the brilliance of their beauty, and who
must ever laugh laugh and love,, with the rouge on
their paling cheeks, and the iron sharp in their souls !
She went out into the sheen of the spring sunshine,
sweeping swiftly and unheedingly through the grounds
of the Due's villa. The birds sang about her path ;
m2
164 STBATHMORE.
she scared them from her; their song was jarring
mockery in her ear. A gardeners child asked her
for alms; she spurned him from her with a cruel
word ; she had lived to envy that beggar's brat play-
ing among the roses, A bright-winged butterfly
fluttered in the grass at her feet ; she trampled it to
a brutal death, for daring to be joyous there that
senseleSs insect ! in the sunny light.
She swept onward swiftly, and unheeding where
she went, while in the distance across the stretch
of wood, and in the sunny mists of coming evening,
uprose the roaf s and spires of Paris Paris, where she
had reigned idol of its Court and leader of its Noblesse ; #
Paris, where she had wielded more than a sovereign's
sway ; Paris, where she had sunk in all the bitterness
of her fall. She swept onward, fast and blindly, through
the glades and gardens, her lips white, her teeth set,
her frame quivering with the shame of that day's degrar-
dation, till a branch of one of the early roses struck
her across the brow, and recalled her to herself with its
sharp physical pain. The flowers swung in the sun-
light the flowers which, with that more poetic
element mingling in her nature, she had ever loved
and interwoven with her beauty. Now, they recalled
a thousand ghastly memories ; ^vith a rapid gesture
she broke them asunder, and tore and scattered their
fragrant leaves upon the earth : she was, even as
those roses, a lying loveliness with a canker at the
core ! And, with a passionate moan of pain, Marion
Vavasour sank down upon the stone steps of the
terrace to which she had unconsciously taken her
THE ABDICATION OF THE PUBPLES. 165
way, and, sinking her graceful, haughty head upon
her hands, gave free vent in solitude to the bitter-
ness of a fallen pride, to the misery of a world-wide
degradation.
Yet even this luxury of loneliness she was denied :
" You suffer now ! "
The words, hissed in her ear in strange ill-spoken
French, made her start and rise with her old proud
imperiousness, yet with something of fear; for the
ruthless vengeance which pursued her had, now that
its worst was wrought, left its terror upon her, and in
her nature, as in the panthers, something of cowardice
ran side by side with cruelty. Bending above her,
over the grey ivy-hung coping, she saw the dark
figure of a vagrant woman; it was the Bohemian,
Bedempta, who had stood there watching her, with a
dark hot flush warming the pale olive of her features,
and lending them new life and light a flush of
thirsty joy. For to the wild, half-savage nature
which had known no duty but its love, no law but
its instincts, revenge- looked great and holy : a just
peace-offering to the beloved dead.
To Marion Vavasour she was unknown her face,
though twice beheld, unremembered and, in vague
alarm, she glanced around, and saw that she had wan-
dered so far to the outskirts of the grounds that she was
only surrounded by woodland, with none within call ;
her hand instinctively sought for gold, and tendered
it in alms to this gipsy, whose gaze filled her with a
nameless terror, thus suddenly met in her hour of
solitude, in her day of dishonour. A smile, mournful
166 BTRATHMOBE.
in its titter disdain, crossed -die lips of the Bohemian,
and she motioned it aside with that calm dignity with
which nature had dowered her :
" Should I touch your gold if I were starving? I
came for a richer guerdon than all the wealth of
empires I came to see you suffer 1"
"Suffer suffer! "
She repeated the word vaguely, mechanically ; in
that moment of abandonment her nerves were un-
strung, her strength beaten down, and the defiance
she had assumed for the world had but left her the
more exhausted and heart-sick with the f aintness of
despair. She could not resent the Bohemian's words,
but only dimly marvelled at them.
The gipsy looked at her, a smile lighting her eyes,
and breaking up from the immutable melancholy of
her face, while her brown hand clenched on the white,
soft arm of Marion Vavasour :
" Ay 1 I have toiled, and laboured, and endured for
that, only for that to see you suffer ! You were the
murderess of Marc Lennartson, the slayer of what I
loved. Ah! false fornicatress, did you never hear
his blood cry out for vengeance ? did you think to
smile, and sin, and drag men down to hell with all
your loveliness,* and never have your crime come
back to you? You slew him and you laughed at
his death. You slew him but I have avenged him !
I have been on your trail day and night, and year
after year ; I burrowed to your secret at last, and I
gave it to Strathmore to destroy you. You suffer !
THE ABDICATIOTJ OP THE PURPLES. 167
your lips are white, your eye* are dim, your face is
haggard yon suffer ! Yon have eaten of such bit-
terness as yon gave ; you hare fallen from your proud
estate ; you will die in lowest infamy. God has given
me vengeance God has given me vengeance ! *
The words broke swift and fierce from the Bohe-
mian's lips, with all the ferocious passion of her
savage race, her eyes glittering, her voice triumphant,
her hand clenching harder on the delicate aim she
bruised in her grip, as she watched the woman she
had hated and pursued shrink back and shiver, and
turn sick under her stripes, as the scourged under
those of the lash. Then the glow faded from her
dark cheek, the vengeful lust and joy from her
gleaming eyes ; she loosened her hold and threw up
her arms with a wild, piteous gesture to Heaven :
u Oh, God ! thou givest me Vengeance, but thou
canst not give me back the Dead! She suffers!
she suffers ! but he "
The shrill, agonised cry died in a broken moan,
her arms fell, her head drooped; she stood livid,
mute, motionless as a statue. For in this lawless,
vagrant woman, born of savage blood and bred by
savage laws, brute instincts were outweighed by one
great love; and that love turned even the long
yearned-f or hour of her vengeance to dead ashes, to
withered fruit for vengeance could not give her
back her dead !
Her eyes dwelt on the face of Marion Vavasour
with a fixed and lifeless gaze of unutterable melan-
168 STRATHMORE.
choly, of fathomless pain, and her voice came slowly
and hoarsely from her lips :
" I have smitten you, but I cannot make you render
back the life that you destroyed! I revenge, but
I cannot recal ! He is dead, and my youth lies with
him in the grave; though I wring you with every
torture, I cannot undo your work. Yet when you
live in shame, and die in infamy, you will remember
the woman who loved, yet was forsaken by him,
avenged him on you, who betrayed and drove him to
his death. If you had spared him, you had been
spared 1"
Then she turned, and moved slowly away with her
head bowed, passing out of sight through the leafy
aisles of the trees ; and Marion Vavasour stood alone,
with the chill of a great and nameless terror upon
her. Her hands clenched on the stone coping as if
for support, her eyes swam, she shivered in the mellow
sunlight, she recoiled under the chastisement of the
great sins which had found her out and come home
to her fruit of the seed sown. She shuddered
there, where she stood in the warm evening air, and
crouched down like a thing of guilt, while the dank
dew stood on her fair, proud brow. And, as though
led by the hand of an avenging angel, her eyes, dim
in her bitter, throbbing misery, unconsciously followed
the circling sweep of a white-winged swallow skim-
ming the surface of the earth ; and as they pursued
the bird's flight, fell on the place where it rested, a
block of marble, lying amidst green luxuriance of
THE ABDICATION OF THE PURPLES. 169
spring-tide flowers and the leaves of drooping trees,
which bore the name of the dead below :
Bertie Erboll,
Aged 33,
Killed by the Hand of his Friend.
The grounds of the villa touched the cemetery of
Auteuil ; beyond, well-nigh at her feet, lay the grave
of the man whom her lie had given to death, with
the brief record carved there by the remorse of his
assassin. And she, who believed in no God, believed
at last in retribution, and stood there paralysed and
stricken with a deadly fear, looking down on the
tomb where the swallow rested and the sunlight
played.
Yet, still still, the soul of this woman knew neither
remorse nor repentance, for these, if they take their
spring from crime, yet are holy, and purify while
they scathe. But only as the panther in its mortal
pain grows fresh hungered for the death-grapple in
its blind instinct of revenge, so she in hers grew
athirst for added evil evil which should smite him
who had been the companion in her sin, yet who had
pursued her as though he were guiltless evil which
should blast the life that had destroyed her own, and
strike to the dust the iron will that had stricken her
evil in which she should hiss back into the ear of
Strathmore the words with which he had doomed
her : " Such mercy as you gave I give to you no
more!"
170
CHAPTER XV.
REQUEBSCAT IN PACE.
Over that grave the twilight shadows stole, the
evening dews gathered in the spring violets which
clustered round the marble, the birds went to roost in
the boughs which swayed above, and the first faint
light of the young moon fell across the letters of the
inscription, carved deep into the stone as though to
stand there, in their recorded crime, through all
change of season and all wear of time, eternal as the
sin of which they told. Shehis murderess had
gone some hours past; and by the grave, unconscious
that she had been there before him, and there sworn
a vow of vengeance ruthless as his own, stood the
companion and the avenger of her guilt. Always
thus in solitude and in the stillness of the night
Strathmore came hither; often, very often, for his
nature was too brave and too proud to spare itself
EEQUIBSOAT IN PACE. 171
one tittle of its chastisement, and the love which he
had borne the man whom he had slaughtered, seemed
to well up in deeper tenderness as everything else in
him grew harder, colder, and more merciless. A
command he could not resist seemed to impel him to
come there as "men go to the scene of their past
crimes, and to stand beside the record of his guilt,
beside the tomb where the life his hand had slain in
all its glory and its youth, lay rotting to decay in the
womb of the black, dank earth*
There, with his head bowed on the cold marble,
and his hands clenched on the wet grass that already
covered the ground, he often lay through many hours
of long, lonely nights ; in what remorse God alone
saw. He would have poured out his own life like
water, to bring back the life that he had slain.
He stood there now, gazing down upon the white
shining stone and the dark leaves which swayed
against it; he felt as though some atonement had
been wrought to Enrol by the vengeance which the
day just passed had crowned. Had his arm ever
paused in the blow he had struck to the assassin of
one, and the betrayer of both, it would have been
nerved and steeled afresh by the memory of the dead.
Beneath the polished ice, the courtly worldliness of
Strathmore^s character, lay the fierce, untamable
nature of the Barbarian, or the untutored Southern,
their passions, their love, their vengeance ; to him there
was not alone revenge in that which he had wrought
on the traitress who had stained his hands in blood ;
172 STRATHMORE.
there was a wild justice done, there was a duty ex-
piated to the dead in the retribution which had pur-
sued the murderess.
As he stood there in the shadowy light, while the
moon streamed upon the sepulchre lying at his feet,
the solitude, which reigned unbroken about ErrolTs
grave, for the first time was shared, and on his ear
fell the low, mellow, chanting voice, of Redempta the
gipsy.
" English lord, I have given you yotir vengeance I
Is it sweet in your teeth, or has it turned to ashes as
you ate?"
He started as her form suddenly rose from the
depths of the woodland gloom and stood before him.
by the grave ; but the chill smile which had so much
of cruelty came on his lips as he glanced at her.
" Redempta, the only thing in life whose sweetness
never palls, and cannot die, is vengeance."
Her deep, lustrous eyes, which were now heavy
and weary, gleamed for the moment with the evil
which glittered in his own, as at the touch of fresh
flame dying embers leap to life.
"Ay, ay, she has suffered! I have seen misery
gather in her eyes, and shame bowing her head to
the dust, I have watohed her shiver under the scorn
of laughter, and I have heard her moan with pain like
a hopeless, fallen thing. She has suffered! That
cannot escape me ! that cannot be undone ! I have
avenged him, and now "
Her voice dropped, and she was silent, while over
EEQUIESOAT IN PACE. 173
the lurid light of her eyes a humid softness gathered,
and her lips trembled with a voiceless movement
her thoughts were with the dead. For the heart of
the woman was in pain, and sickened with the futility
of a revenge which could not yield her back what she
had loved ; it knew not the exultant and pitiless lust
of the man, which rioted in vengeance, and fed on its
knowledge, and its memory, insatiate and unpalled.
For there was this wide difference between the pas-
sions of their lives : hers sprang from love which still
lived and was deathless, his from love which had
become hatred, and in that hatred lost all other sense.
Strathmore glanced at her in the gloaming; he
owed this woman much, since he owed her the first
secret of his power over the life which he had pursued
and hunted down; and the sole price which the
Bohemian had asked or taken had been that which
she had first named : " to see her suffer."
He stretched out his hand with some louis d'or :
"Redempta, you are ill- clad and in want; take
these now, and in the future let me serve you?"
She signed aside the proffered gift with a proud
gesture of denial, and on her face came a strange
smile, derisive yet melancholy :
" My lord ! I told you long ago that Redempta the
Vagrant took no price for that which she brought you
no wage for her vengeance. Since his hand lay in
mine, no man's gold has soiled it ; and with the future
I have no share ; my work is done. The future is
for you: it lies before you; go where it beckons!"
174 STBATHMORE.
As the Czeschen words were uttered in the mono-
tonous, chanting recitative in which she spoke, to the
memory of each recurred the spring night far away
in Bohemia, when the ruddy gleam of the gipsy-fires
had shone through the aisles of the pine woods, and
when froin the slumbering passions written on his
brow she had made sure prophecy of all which, when
they should awaken, would scorch and devastate
his life. Her hand closed on his arm in a grasp
which he could not have shaken from him without
violence, while her eyes dwelt on him where he stood
in the gloom, and studied his face with the same fixed,
dreamy gaze with which she had looked on him then :
a look which had much of compassion.
u I have no future, but one waits for you ; you
must reap as you have sown ; you must gather the
harvest, and eat of the fruit of your past. It is the
inexorable law ! The past has been wrought by your
own hand; but the future will escape you. You
will seek to build anew, and lo ! the curse of the dead
sin will rest on your work, and the structure will
crumble, falling to ashes as it reaches its fairest.
The sin of the guilty has been avenged, but the sin
to the innocent will never be washed away. You
will be great and powerful, and success will go with
you, and fame ; but the blood-stain will be on your
hand for ever, and when you have made atonement,
behold it will be seized in your grasp, and through
you will the guiltless be menaced I"
The words in her Czeschen tongue fell slowly and
KEQUIBSCAT W PACE. 175
melodiously in the silence in her mournful and mono-
tonous recitation, while her eyes dwelt on his face
with their vague, fathomless gaze. Her hand dropped
from his arm and left him free.
"In the future you will remember the words of
Redempta. We shall meet no more. Farewell I"
She turned from him, and, with the swift, noiseless
movement peculiar to her tribe, was lost in the veiling
shadows of the night. He. stood motionless where
she had left hin^. in the dull, grey light as the moon
passed behind the clouds of the east. Again at her
words ran a ghastly chill, as at the touch of steel in a
vital wound; less from their prophecy than from
their truth ; the future stretched before him, dark-
ened for all time, by the shadow of remembered guilt.
His hand might pioneer his road to power, and reap
him honour in the sight of men, but there for ever
on it must rest the stain of innocent blood. His life
might pass onwards in the fulness, of years and the
ripeness of triumph, but there for ever at its core
must lie the curse of an inexpiable act.
Never to lose it, ever to bear it through all the
years to come, that burden of life taken, never to be
restored ; of sin wrought, never to be undone ! Veiled
in the mist of hidden years, who knew what guiltless
life that guilt might strike ? who knew what retribu-
tion might be coiled and waiting to take its vengeance
for the unforgotten crime? who knew where the
after-harvest of his passions might be reaped and
garnered?
176 STBATHHOBE.
The future ! the future ! He had said in his soul,
u vengeance to the living, but to the dead, atonement."
Standing there beside the grave of him whom he
had slain, while the words of the prophecy echoed in
his ear, the phantoms of the years to come seemed to
rise and swarm about him, and rend, and tear, and
shatter from his hands the work of Expiation.
That night the Seine wound slowly and darkly
through the open country and under the pale, clear
stars, and among the rich glades of woodland, to-
wards the city, there to grow black and sullen beneath
the arches of dim-lit bridges, and to wash the low
walls of the dreary Morgue, and to see the yellow
candle faintly burning above the iron cradle of the
Enf ans Trouves, and the thousand lights gleaming
bright along the palace facade of the Tuileries.
And where the river was still clear, and cool, and
fresh, ere it had reached the evil heat and brooding
shadows of the city, where green leaves still swayed
into its water, and in its depths the starlight gleamed,
where its darkness was still repose, and its silence
holy, a human form hovered on its brink, bending
wearily towards the tranquil gliding waters, where the
water-lily floated, and the hush of night seemed
visibly to rest.
It was so cool, so serene, so peaceful : to lie there
lulled to dreamy death by the cadence of its ebb and
flow, and know no more the passionate pain, the
breathless tumult, the vain despair, and the unending
REQUIESOAT IN PACE. 177
bitterness of life, were this not wisdom, oh you who
suffer?
It looked so to her; for her soul was weary of its
travail, and her heart was fain to be at rest. She
looked far across the dark and silent country, where
no living thing stirred, and upward to the stars, whose
white light fell upon Her deep and melancholy eyes :
her hands were pressed upon her bosom, and her lips
moved in faint, broken words :
" I have avenged thee. What have I more to do
with life?"
Her head drooped upon her breast, and she leaned
nearer and nearer towards the waters, where the quiet
stars were shining, and the pale lilies slowly floating
in their shroud of leaves, where were oblivion, and
peace, and death ; and in the 'silence she listened to
the tranquil murmuring of the tide. And as she thus
leaned nearer and nearer yet towards that cool and
restful place, in her weary eyes shone the gleam of
unshed tears, and in her face a new light came as on
the face of one who, having been long imprisoned in
the loneliness of exile, beholds escape at last ? and
liberty and rest.
From her parted lips a whisper stole, broken and
yearning, on the hush of night :
" My love ! my love ! I come 1"
And in the silence there was the dull moan of
severed waters, and the troubled lilies trembled on
the river's breast: then, with a sighing sound, the
wind swept over them, and all was still.
The waters flowed upon their changeless course.
VOL. II. N
178 STRATHMORE.
Through the summer night the river wound its
way under the radiance of the stars, and bore her
with it more gently than life, more tenderly than
human hands. The waters rippled on with liquid
murmur, and the dead body of the Bohemian
floated down the stream in its serene and solemn
rest, Adding repose at last after the heat and travail,
the passion and the pain, of many years. To her
untaught, unfettered soul, love had been God, and
vengeance, Duty; and death was ransom justly won,
after a mission justly wrought; death in her wild,
instinctive, barbaric creed was sure reunion with him
for whom she had suffered and been sacrificed, and to
whom her life had been unceasingly consecrated even
to the last, if erring in its revenge, yet heroic in its
martyrdom.
The waters bore her onwards slowly, softly, as
merciful hands bear the bier of the dead ; now in the
cool shadow of the leaves, now in the clear sheen of
midnight planets, while on her upturned brow and her
closed eyes the moonlight shone with fair and peaceful
gleam, and in her dark, floating hair the stainless
lilies wound, and through the hush of night the winds
gently breathed over the surface of the waters, which
murmured low about her as though in pitying
whisper :
" Rest in peace, O human soul ! And judge her
not for sin which had its root in love, you great and
countless criminals upon earth, whose lust is avarice,
and whose god is self."
179
CHAPTEE XVI.
AFTER LONG YEARS.
A sultry night brooded over London, close and
stifling in the dusty, crowded streets, fair and pure
above-head, where the stars shone over the leaden
roofs and the fretted pinnacles of the great Abbey,
tver the thronging carriages rolling through the mid-
night, and the black river, with its spectral mists
rising against the sky. It was a^hot, oppressive night,
wifli heavy storm-clouds drifting to the westward,
and every now and then a far-off roll of thunder
faintly echoing ; and outside the walls of St. Stephen's
men thronged, talking eagerly, and avaricious of news,
and waiting to learn the fate of the existent Cabinet ;
for in the political horizon, as in the summer skies, a
storm theatened darkly, and the kingdom had thrilled
with the first ominous echoes. And they surged and
swayed and filled all the crooked streets round about,
and were newly fed by fresh arrivals, and talked
N2
180 STBATHMOBE.
thirstily in busy groups, some anxious-eyed and with
pale, eager faces ; for the Ministry was unpopular,
and on the issue of the night there rested not alone
the question of resignation, but the question of war
or peace, in whose balance the God of Gold hung
trembling.
Within the walls the heat was heavier, the crowd
more dense, for many peers had come down to their
seats beneath the clock, and the galleries were
crammed ; the import of the night was widely known,
and the attack upon the Ministry from the most dis-
tinguished leader of the Opposition carried with it
all the aspirations of his great party, and was keenly
dreaded by his adversaries then in office.
For he was essentially a great Statesman. His
genius was emphatically the genius of Power. In
classic ages he would have been either a tyrant as
Pisistratus, or an intriguer as Themistocles ; a ruler
as Caesar, or a conspirator as Catiline; what he
grasped, how he grasped, mattered nothing to him,
so that he had his hand on iron reins, so that he had
his foot on bended necks. The subtle ruses, the
unscrupulous finesse, the imperious command, the
absolute dominance of power, these were what he
loved ; and what he wielded, for his mind was one of
those which are formed to rule y and before which the
mass of minds involuntarily stoops suppliant. In his
age and in his country, his ambition was perforce
chained within bounds, and he could not be that
which he would have been in a nation or a century
AFTER LONG YEARS. 181
where such governance might have been grasped an
irresponsible and despotic ruler, recognising no limits
to his sway, and reigning by the sheer strength of
a will of steel, and of an intellect which would have
raised his people into greatness and dominance abroad,
and would have permitted no rebellious hint against
his fiat lux. This, circumstance and nationality for-
bade to him ; but the character and the genius which
could have made him this, made him in the highest
sense a great and successful politician, A profound
master of statecraft, &n astute reader of men, a
skilled orator as well by the closeness of his logic as
by mere rhetorical grace, comprehending to the utter-
most the truth of the trite byword ars est celare
artem; never for one instant irritated into abandon-
ment of the suave courtly dignity which did much to
fascinate men to his will, and with that proud dis-
dain of wealth, of empty place, of childish honours,
which gave to his career a lofty and unsullied renown
he who in his youth had desired Age and Power,'
now, approaching to the one, and having attained to
the other, found ambition richly ripened to fruition,
and exercised over the minds of men a sway wide
and acknowledged, a fascination resistless and domi-
nant.
As he rose at midnight in the hot, close stillness,
all eyes turned on him, and the cheers which
thundered his welcome echoed loud and long, then
died away, leaving a 'silence in which the fall of a
pin would have been heard, had one dropped from
182 8TBATHM0BE.
the lattice-work, behind which were seated the fairest
and proudest women of the two great political parties^
The dead hush reigned through the Lower Chamber,
so that no syllable of the opening words should be
lost, as [upon the air fell the first clear, chilly melo-
dious tones of his voice, which in invective waff ever
tranquil, in command ever calm^ in denunciation ever
courtly, but whose wrath scathed keen as steel, whose
mockery pitilessly withered all it touched, and whose
dreaded sneer spared neither friend nor foe.
He stood in the full light/one hand in his breast,
the other slightly outstretched ; on his face a certain
melancholy repose, a tranquil and haughty power ; in
his eyes the swift light, which swept the House like
an eagle's glance ; on his lips the slight smile that his
opponents dreaded ; while the lucid, classic, resistless
flow of his oratory rolled on, calm, polished, subdued,
as suited an audience he had long studied, never
losing its dignity, while it rose to denunciation, hold-
ing in passion, while it lashed with scorn, fascinating
the ear by the melodious music of voice, while it
scathed with delicate irony, or rose to stately and
measured rebuke.
He spoke long and with a masterly eloquence ; his
speech was an analysis and attack of a measure of the
existing Government, obnoxious at home and preg-
nant with offence abroad. Loud and repeated cheers
thundered through the Chamber as his keen logic
mercilessly dissected the weak and wavering policies
of the Ministry, and Ins brilliant argument cleft
AFTEE LONG TBAES.^ 183
down their barriers of defence, and rent asunder their
sophistries of rhetoric, as the sword of SaUdin cut
its way alike through iron casque and veil of gauze.
When he resumed his seat the victory of his party
was virtually won, and one of the most marked
triumphs which had attended a continuously success-
ful career had been achieved: a tattering govern-
ment, already jeopardised by its own imprudence,
and unpopular with press and people, had been
shaken by an attack to which it could oppose but
feeble reply and futile defence, and it was widely
whispered that the Ministry must resign on the
morrow.
Since the great speeches of Sheridan and Canning,
few had created so keen an excitement, few weighted
so markedly the balance of parties, few thrilled the
House so profoundly with the breathlessness of a
gladiatorial contest,, the heat of a close struggle,
the grandeur of a great conquest. As he left the
Lobby afterwards his name was on every tongue, and
while the proud tranquillity of his features and of his
manners was unruffled, and he passed from the scene
of a supreme conflict with the easy negligence of
his habitual air, unmoved to excitement or to exulta*-
tion, in his eyes gleamed an imperious rejoicing
light under their drooping lids, and they glittered
dark with a grand triumph ; for this man's god was
Power, the essence of his life, the goal of his ambition,
the idol of his creed.
As he passed out from the Commons to his night
184 STBATHMOBE.
brougham, the multitudes gathered outside (amongst
whom had been spread swiftly as wild-fire the news
that the Ministry had been defeated on their un-
popular measure, and the country been saved from
the risk of a needless war by the issue of that great
Field-night) recognised in the gaslights the grace of
carriage and the haughty features of the well-known
member, and pressing forwards by one impulse to
view him more closely, broke by one impulse also,
into a long, loud shout of salutation, which rang
through the sultry air of the late night, quelling in
its own thunder the distant roll of the rising storm.
It was Titan homage, rendered with the spontaneity
of academic applause, and the hoarse roar with
which the masses hurl out their gratitude and
welcome, grim, wild, half barbaric, yet grand in
its deafening echo and intoxicating in its enthusiasm,
like every proclamation of the people, which in the
Leader of the Hour recognises the virtual Sovereign
of the Land.
He whom they thus saluted passed through them,
bowing slightly on either side in acknowledgment, with
dignity and courtesy; he held the imperious patri-
cian code of his Norman race, he was an Optimate to
the core, and the plaudits of the Populares were
almost as indifferent to him, almost as disdained by
him, as their censure ; he had much of the despot, he
had nothing of the demagogue. But in those cheers
echoed the homage which multitudes yield to a single
dominant intellect ; in that welcome rang the accla-
"H
AFTEB LONG YEABS. 185
mations which greet and confirm command ; in that
human thunder, which outpealed the thunder of the
skies, his sway was ratified by the nation ; and as his
glance swept over the people, and he passed down
the narrow path, left him, lined by eager crowds, the
Statesman's pulse quickened and beat higher, and the
lustre of his eyes gleamed darker with their scornful
triumph ; Strathmore tasted to its full sweetness the
one lust of his soul Power.
O strange unequal portioner called Life! unjust
are its awards and inscrutable its decrees.
The murdered man, who when the summer sun
had sunk to rest, had been hurled into his grave,
guiltless of all crime save of a too loyal friendship,
lay rotting in a foreign land, forgotten from the day
when the seal had been set on his sepulchre, by a
world which has no time to count its lost.
And his destroyer lived, high in honour amidst
men.
186
CHAFFER XVII.
THE PILGRIMAGE OF EXPIATION.
A sojtt, serene, richly-tinted picture^ fairer than
a thought of Lancret's, more golden and tranquil
than a dream of Claude's, since one hour of sun-
light on one stretch of moss one fruit-laden bough,
one changeful brook, outshines and baffles the best
that we, vain painters of nature, can ever catch of
her glorious loveliness on canvas or palette. Who
knows this better than the Masters of the Art?
The setting sun shone on the oriel casements of an
antique ivy-covered Elizabethan mansion, and stream-
ing through the unclosed door of an old stone wall,
ripened to gold the fruit of an orchard, whose
branches nodded through the opening. Far away
to the west, wide, calm, limitless, stretched the great
ocean, the gleam of the light falling on the white sail
of some fisher boat in the offing. Beyond the tangled
leaves of trees, shone the glisten of wet sands and the
THE PILGKIMAGE OF EXPIATION. 1 87
led boulders of the rocks. In the silence there was
no sound but of the birds' last nest-songs, and of the
murmuring seas; and under the shelter of dense
boughs, shutting out the sun, was a shadowy solitude*
where nothing came save the fragrance of countless
flowers, and nothing was seen save the silent sunlit
bay, when the arching branches parted to show the
sheen of sand and sea. It was a home fit for Undine,
here in the shadow of the leaves, the earth covered
with the delicate bells of heath, the foliage filled with
the soft movement and music of young birds, the
blue waters gleaming through the spaces of the
boughs, the silence but the more serene for the lull-
ing cadence of the seas; and she to whom it was
consecrated might well have been sketched as Un-
dine, where she sat, with her head slightly drooped
and her lips slightly parted. For she was in the
earliest years of opening youth, and of a loveliness
ethereal, poetic, such as Dante may have prefigured
amidst the angel shadows of the Paradiso, or Ghiido
Reni have beheld flit through the heaven of his
visionary thoughts, too pure, too fair, for the artist
to transfer to grosser colouring.
Both poet and painter would have loved that face,
but neither could have made it imperishable on writ-
ten vellum or on tinted canvas ; it could no more have
been imprisoned to such transcript than the blush on
the heath-bells, than the smile on the seas, than the
fugitive play of the sunlight. It had a beauty beyond
words, beyond Art.
188 STRATHMOEB.
The brow was low and broad, the skin delicate as
a white rose-leaf, with the faint flush on the cheeks
beautifully fitful ; the eyes large, dark, shadowed by
their lashes till their violet depths looked black. But
what lay beyond poet to phrase, or artist to produce,
were not these, but were the spirituality of the whole
face vaguely suggestive of too early death, utterly
above all grosser passion, all meaner thought of earth,
and the touching and nameless contrast of the sunny
joyous smile upon the lips with the fathomless sadness
of the eyes, of the grace and radiance of childhood
with the ethereal melancholy of the features in re-
pose. It was a loveliness like that of the delicate
tropic flower which blooms but to perish in all its
early beauty ; too fragile for the storms and darkness
of night, too soilless to wither on earth. She sat there,
with the shadow of the thick leaves above her, and
around her the melody of the ocean, the music of the
birds, and the dreamy hum of bees deep down in the
chalice of flowers.
And one unseen, as he stood and watched her, was
never weary of gazing on that delicate picture, though
it had been familiar to him from his childhood. He
was a youth of two-and-twenty, tall, lithe, of a
thorough Saxon beauty, with his bright fearless face,
his bold blue eyes, his tawny hair, yet he did not suit
that scene ; he was out of harmony with it, and he
broke its spell, even as he broke that of her thoughts,
as he put aside the boughs and bent towards her very
gently:
THE PILGRIMAGE OF EXPIATION. 189
" Lucille ! where are your dreams?"
She started a little, and looked up at him with a
glad smile.
" Nello ! I banished you ; is this the way you obey ?
Look! how you frighten the birds and trample the
heath."
Lionel Garyll looked sad and repentant as the
singers flew from him with a rapid whirr of their
wings, and he glanced down on the trodden bells.
" Oh, Lucille, I am sorry ! But surely you love
me something better than you do those birds and
those flowers ? They feel no pain !"
"I think they do," she said, musingly. "Look
how birds' eyes grow wild and piteous when you go
near their nests, and how they droop and pine if they
lose the one they love ; and look how the flowers fade
when they are taken from the sun, and wither slowly
when they are torn away to die under the pressure
of your hand. Ah! I cannot bear to see a flower
crushed or broken, Nello. We cannot tell what it
may suffer."
Her eyes grew humid and earnest in their dark
depths, for the ruling power of her nature, as its fatal
danger, was a deep and infinite tenderness, a too
keen and too early susceptibility. Young Caryll did
not understand her, he did not even follow the thread
of her thoughts ; in the long years they had spent
together, the poetic and profound mind of the child
had always been above and beyond the bo/s compre-
hension ; they were so now, but now, as then, he felt
190 strathmOer
for all she did and said a tender and reverent love, as
for something at once too holy and too fragile for his
rougher hands.
"Who could hurt what you plead for, Lucille I"
he said fondly. " But if you give so much compas-
sion to your flowers and birds, give a little to me."
She laughed joyously :
"Pity you, NeDo ! What pity do you want ? You
are as happy as I am ! Why,Nello, you are sunshine
itself!"
The young man's bright face laughed sunnily in
answer : it was the truth, his nature and his life were
both shadowless.
" Yes, but pity me for seeing that the song-birds
and the heaths are both dearer to you than I! True
they suit you better, Lucille ; they are poetic and
delicate, and I am neither ; but they cannot love you
so well!"
in the half -laughing words, in the half-boyish
appeal, there was, almost unknown to himself, an
inflection of jealous pain, of touching humility, which
struck on his listener's ear with some vague sense
that she unwittingly had wounded him, though how
she knew not With caressing grace she stooped
towards him, where he lay at her feet, and pushed
back the tangled hair from his forehead.
"My own dear Nello, I know that! Could you
think I rank those things before you ? For Bhame !
I thought you knew better how I loved you I"
For the playmate and companion of her childhood
THE PILGRIMAGE OP EXPIATION. 191
was very dear to her, and it was an impulse with her
to soothe all pain, from the flutter of a frightened
bird to the sorrow of a human heart; and Lionel
Caryll gazed upward with an eager pleasure in his
eyes, while his lips were mute : it was the reverent
and breathless gaze of the young devotee at the
beauty of a Madonna or a Vivia Perpetua, the beauty
which is too sacred in his sight to waken passion,
or be profaned by aught save a holy worship.
He rose with a smothered sigh as he recollected the
object of his errand, for he would gladly have stayed
here till the moon rose, with murmur of the sea in
his ear and. the hand of Lucille softly playing with
his hair, in the familiar affection which from her
infancy she had shown to, and received from, one
whom she called her brother.
4i Lucille, Lord Cecil is her&-^I came to tell you."
"Here!"
u Yes, he has come down for part of the Easter
recess ; only a day or two, for he is going to Osborne.
He bade me fetch you to him."
Ere the words were spoken she had sprang to her
feet, dropping the Vita Nuova she was reading, and
the feathery seaweeds which had lain on her lap, to
the ground, and had left him, Eghtly and swiftly as
the flight of a wild bird.
Lionel Caryll stood in the shadow of the leaves,
looking after her. From his earliest years, when
the young child, orphaned and desolate and un-
conscious in her glad infancy of her own fate, had
192 8TEATHM0EE.
first come to Silver-rest, lie had been careful of her
every step, jealous of her every smile ; he had fol-
lowed her like a spaniel and tended her like a woman,
and risked his life and limb many a time to bring her
down some sear-bird's egg, some flower from the cliffs,
some treasure from the waves,
Lucille loved him very fondly, for this child's
whole life and nature were tenderness ; but the boy
had always felt [what he felt now, that two stood
before him in her heart the dead, whose name she
cherished with a reverence which was almost a religion,
and the one whom she and the world knew as her
guardian.
In the deep embrasure of one of the windows sat a
man, with a staghound at his feet, and his face in
shadow, as Eembrandt or Velasquez painted the faces
of the statesmen and conspirators who sought their
canvas, to whose portraits, indeed, he bore a strange
and striking resemblanee, for Strathmore with the
flight of years had altered little. The darker traits
were more traceable, the better less so ; for in the
human face, as in the picture, with time the shadows
deepen and the lights grow fainter. The eyes were
more searching, the brow more powerful, the features
colder and more inscrutable still. Otherwise there
was but little change save this, that whereas before,
the character of his f ace had been suggestive of evil
passions, dormant and not yet called into play, it now
bore the shadow of them from the past, the trace of
THE PILGEIMAGE OF EXPIATION. 193
fires which had burned to ashes, scorching as they
died.
Strathmore, who was God and Law unto himself,
had moulded his life with an iron hand, although on
that hand was the stain of crime. Submerged for
awhile under the surge of passion, the ambition which
had been drowned under a woman's love had returned
to him ; a diplomatic career he had abandoned for
public life at home, and he had reared himself from
the fires of past crimes to follow one road Power.
Eminence in statecraft, his astute, subtle, and masterly
intellect was formed to attain and wield. Under his
chill and withering eloquence parties writhed; before
his courtly and poignant wit opponents cowered ; be-
neath the dominance of his will, wavering adherents
bowed; and before the silent and profound mind of
the successful politician men felt abashed, discomfited,
yet governed despite themselves.
Strathmore was great in many things in his genius,
in his endurance, in his power, in his arrogance ; and
he had that veiled yet astute will which bends that of
all others to its bidding, and governs the minds of
men by a resistless, though not seldom an evil, fasci-
nation to its sway. To trample out the memories of
the past by dissipation was impossible to the man
whose intellect was masterly, and who had rioted in
the drunkenness of guilt ; the revel of orgies was dis-
tasteful, the pursuit of licentiousness was contemptible
to him. Forgetfiilness he sought otherwise, under the
iron tramp of mailed ambitions ; or rather, to speak
VOL. II. o
194 STRATHMORE.
more truly, f orgetfulness he did not court, as weaker
men would do; but as he had kept the mad love
which had betrayed him before him, to be avenged
brutally and ruthlessly, so he kept the crime which
had stained his soul, to be atoned for as though
destiny lay in his hands, so he kept the blood-stain on
the statue of his Life, to be wrought out by his own
hand in after work. For Strathmore, though the
pride of his nature had been smitten to the dust, and
though he had reeled and fallen under passion, had
refused to gather warning from the past, but held it
still his to mete out fate to himself and others, as
though he were not man but deity.
The sunlight played without, among the leaves
while the ocean broke upon the sunny sands, and
he sat there in the shadow: on his face was the
look of a weary and hopeless melancholy, which
never wholly passed away, for the soul of this man,
if merciless to others, was not less so to himself;
in spirit he scourged himself for the lives which
rested on his, as loathingly as ever Carmelite or Bene-
dictine scourged the body for its sins, and whilst
before men's sight his life was cold, unruffled, brilliant,
and his "path strewn with the purples" of fame and
of power, there were dark hours in his solitude, of
remorse, of anguish, of unutterable horror, when
the great and fallen nature wrestled with itself, and
struggled in its agony nearer to God's light. For
repentance is a word by a thousand-fold too faint to
THE PILGRIMAGE OF EXPIATION. 195
titter that with which Strathmore looked back upon
the past looked back upon the homicide guiltier than
Cain's.
Suddenly, where he sat in the embrasure, a shadow
fell athwart the sunshine without, and raising his
eyes he saw the young life which was freighted with
his venture of atonement. She stood there in the full
golden light, which fell on her fair and shining hair ;
on her eyes, dark as the violet skies of night, and full
of their mournful earnestness; on her lips, which
wore the sunny and tender smile of the long-dead,
radiant with welcoming joy while words were mute ;
words could not have spoken half so well !
"Lucille!"
He rose, and she sprang towards him, lifting her fair
young face to his gaze, while he stooped and kissed her
brow with his accustomed caress, which she received
as a child her father's. Her hands closed on his
softly and caressingly, her lips were tremulous, her
eyes, loving in their earnestness, looked up to his
winningly, beseechingly :
" Ah ! you are come at last ; you have been so
long away !"
" 'So long !' You have watched for me, then ?"
u My heart watches for you always !"
He smiled ; her answer gave him pleasure. Long
years before he had set his will to fasten the love and
gratitude of this young life upon himself, and every
assurance of them were dear to him, for they were
02
196 STRATHMOKE.
the assurance of his fulfilment of ErrolTs trust, of
his atonement through the living to the dead.
" And yon are happy, Lucille ? n he asked her.
She laughed the soft, low laugh of her still linger-
ing childhood, in which pain had been a thing un-
known, to which sorrow had been a mystery ever
veiled.
" You ask me that so often ! 'Happy ? ' All my
life is happiness. I cannot even fancy grief. I try
sometimes, and I cannot.''
"Thank God!"
The words were spoken low and heartfelt, and he
shaded his eyes with his hand as he gazed down on
her, while over the coldness of his face stole a
warmth and a softness which never came there save
when he looked on her. Her singular and poetic
loveliness, as she stood before him in the mellow sun-
light, with her dark eyes uplifted in their beseeching
beauty, struck on him ; he saw for the first time that
she was passing out of childhood.
u You are changed, Lucille," he said, as she threw
herself at his feet, where he sat, in that graceful and
trustful abandon which was as natural to her now as
when she had first come caressingly to his side on
the sea-shore; for this opening life had been left
free, pure, untrammelled by art or bondage, as any of
the white-winged birds which spent their summer
days above the waves.
She looked up incredulous and amused :
" Changed ? How can I be in six months t"
THE PILGBIMAGE OP EXPIATION. 197
" Six months is six years at your age : the passage
from childhood to womanhood is very brief ; crossed
sometimes in a night, sometimes in an hour!"
" Is it ? But / have not crossed it."
" No, and I do not wish that you should."
She lifted her eyes to his, full of that appealing
earnestness which gave them so strange a sadness, so
touching a beauty.
" No more do I. When time rolls on, the shadows
deepen across the dial in the orchard, and the sands
of the shore ; so they say they do in life. Is it true,
Lord Cecil?"
"Fatally true, my child."
She shuddered slightly :
" Ah ! and that is why I wish mine could rest for
ever where it is. I am so happy, and I dread the
shadow ! In shade the flowers die, you know, killed
by the darkness and thirsting for the sun; so
should I."
"Hush, hush, Lucille!" he said, passionately, as
he drew her towards him, where she sat at his feet.
"' Dread?' ' Darkness?' What have they to do
with you? Neither shall ever touch you. Your
future is my care ; think of it as what it will be, shall
be, as fair and cloudless as your past and present.
No shadow shall ever fall on you ! "
" Not under your shelter I "
And as she spoke gratefully and caressingly, the
smile was on her face which still smote him as with
steel, and she bent towards him with that tender and
198 STBATHMOEE.
trustful grace natural to her from her earliest in-
fancy: she loved the hand which fostered her the
hand stained with her father's blood.
The human life which the last words of the man
he loved had bequeathed to him in tru^t, was dear to
Strathmore as the dead had once been ; and when re-
morse had struck prostrate the granite of his nature, in
the chasm left, this single softness had been sown and
taken root ; even as on the chill and isolated moun-
tains ice-covered and inaccessible, deep down in some
cleft and hidden rent, lives some delicate blue alpine
flower. Begotten of remorse, born of a thirst for
atonement,, and fostered by a passionate, almost a
morbid, craving to fulfil to the uttermost ErrolTs
latest bidding, his tenderness for Lucille had become
the one holy and unselfish thing in a heart to which
the gentler and purer feelings of human nature and
of human ties were by nature alien.
Strathmore's haughty and sin-stained soul hung on
this young and fragile girlhood for its single chance
and power of atonement. It was not she for whom
he cared ; it was the dead. Had the last words of the
man he had wronged and hurled from earth, con-
demned him to endless self -chastisement, or self-sacri-
fice, he would have obeyed them equally, nor spared
himself one iota of their enjoined torture. Pitiless
to others, I say he was not less pitiless to himself ;
his life, stained with great crimes, was riven with a
great remorse; his nature was like those lofty and
darkened ones which first filled the cells of Olairvaux
THE PILGRIMAGE OF EXPIATION. 199
and the ranks of Loyola; natures passion-stained
and crime-steeped, but which, even as they had
spared none in their guilt, spared not themselves in
their expiation.
The trust bequeathed him, and bound upon him,
by the weight of the two lives which his act had
struck from earth, he fulfilled sacredly. His hand
had orphaned her, but his hand sheltered her, and
was prodigal in the wealth, and care, and luxury with
which it surrounded her ; it seemed to Strathmore as
though thus, and thus alone, could he atone to him
who had given her life. In his mother's home she
had grown from infancy to early youth, fondly nur-
tured, and trained to know that it was from him as
her guardian that she received all which made her
young years so joyous. Those to whom her educa-
tion was entrusted he forbade to use any laws with
her save those of gentleness, and directed to surround
her with all tenderness, to shield her from every touch
of pain or harshness, and to indulge her in all things.
He was scrupulously obeyed, and the result might
have been to many natures dangerous ; with Lucille,
the inherent character was too loving and too sweet
to be thus harmed, to do aught but expand to all
its richest luxuriance, its purest delicacy, in the con-
stant sunlight in which it. grew, though, as the hot-
house flower is rendered unfit for the cold winds
without by the warmth which surrounds it, so might
this nature be for the harsh conflicts of life. But,
then, these she was never to know from these she
200 STRATHMOBE.
would be sheltered, as the exotic is, through the whole
of its brief and radiant life.
In pursuance of ErrolPs desire, he trained himself
to speak to this child often and calmly of her father,
as of one lost and dear to him as to herself, until
Lucille held, inseparably interwoven and beloved in
her memory, the dead, and the living to whom the
dead had bequeathed her, and who filled his place.
It had been hard to say which were the dearer to her,
the ideal of her father which she cherished, or the love
for Strathmore which grew with her growth. No in-
stinct had made her shrink in infancy from the hand
which was stained with her father's blood ; no pre-
science now warned her that he who fostered her
was her father's foe. All her joy, all her gifts, came
from him ; for her, his eyes were ever softened, his
voice was ever gentle ; the distant visits he paid her
were sealed with gold in her life, radiating every day
they graced with a glory ever missed in his absence.
And thus Erroll's young child grew up in her grace-
ful loveliness, her happy innocence, with no shadow
allowed to fall on her from the dark tragedy which had
orphaned her almost from her birth, but with a deep
and reverent love for him, between whom and herself,
had she known the truth hid from her, there would
have yawned a hideous and impassable gulf, there
would have stretched a fell abyss of crime which
woulc^ have made her shrink from every touch of his
hand, shudder from every caress of his lips.
201
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE CABINET MINISTER.
A KNOT of lords and gentlemen, diplomatists and
ministers, were grouped together in the ante-room at
St. James's, after attending a Levee the last of the
season chatting while awaiting a chance of getting
to their carriages through the crowd, where torn
shoulder-knots, trampled epaulettes, the debris of
gold lace, fragments of bullion, broken plumes, or
shreds of order ribbons, bore witness to the severity
of the conflict, which is a portion of the ceremonial
attendant on the Germanised Court of England.
" But V gained so much by the Schonbrun
Treaty ; he is far too exigeant," said the French
Ambassador, alluding to the subject under discussion,
which was the aggression of a petty Duke, who
might chance to embroil Western Europe ; European
tempests x not seldom being brewed in a Liliputian
teacup.
202 STRATHMORE.
" But others gained, too, by the treaty," suggested
an English Minister, " and grapes shared are poisoned
to most gatherers. With a whole bunch to ourselves,
we grudge the broken stalk that we leave behind."
" Hein ! c'est vrai ! " laughed a Prussian Statesman,
applying himself to his tabatifere. " Still if he were
decently wise he would be content."
" Is it wise to be content ? " smiled the English
Minister ; and his smile was cold and ironic. " What
duller atmosphere possible than Contentment? A
satisfied man has nothing to desire, gain, or contest ;
he is a mould-grown carp in stagnant waters "
"Which are the quietest," added the Prussian,
who had too much slow Teuton blood in him not to
relish " stagnant waters." " I suppose V thinks
with you, or he would never thrust forth such claims ;
he knows the Federation will never acknowledge
them."
"But they will foment disturbance; they will
draw the eyes of Europe on him for half a dozen
months, and many would rather be decorated like
Midas, than move unnoticed and unknown in
secretum iter et fallentis semita vita,"
said the English Statesman, with a contemptuous
laugh, cold, slight, and clear.
"Et puis," said the Ambassador, with a slight
shrug; "the opportunity was tempting. Man was
created a dishonest animal, and policy and civilisation
have raised the instinct to a science."
THE CABINET MINISTEB. 203
" And what he seeks now is for c Patriotism/
Let none of us forget that. 'Pro Patria' is so
admirable a plunder-cry; I don't know a better,
unless it be i Pro Deo/ " smiled the Englishman,
whose own cri de guerre was, with but little disguise,
"Pro Ego."
Standing at a little distance, wedged in by the
titled and decorated mob, a man looked at him as
he spoke ; the words were inaudible where the other
stood, but the smile he saw and knew of old, he had
seen it on his lips when the sun sank down beyond
the purple shroud of mist, seen it as the duellist
stooped to watch the dark blood slowly trailing
through the grasses, with the passionate and cruel
lust which branded him assassin. Raoiil de Valdor
had long forgot that hour, from the indifference of
custom to a life so taken, and by long years passed in
a fashionable whirl. At the time it had chilled and
revolted him from the man who, with deliberate pur-
pose, had slain his friend with the unerring aim and
greed with which a tiger darts upon his prey, insatiate
to destroy and indifferent to destruction. But their
intercourse had remained the same, and the remem-
brance had drifted into the mist of long past things.
It rarely recurred to him, yet it did so now, standing
in the thronged ante-chamber of the palace, when
glancing at the successful Statesman, with the ribbon
crossed on his breast, and the cold courtly smile
on his lips, there arose before him, sudden and
distinct, the memory of that summer night, with the
204 STBATHMOBE.
hooting of the shrill cicala, and the sullen surge of the
noisome waters as the reptiles stirred amongst their
reeds, and the last fays of the evening sun gleaming
above the storm-cloud as the dying man reeled and
fell.
He looked at Strathmore as he stood among his
peers; and, strange, dissimilar, unbidden, the scene
rose up before the memory of the inconsequent and
thoughtless Frenchman, as he stood among the court
crowd of St. James's. Yet he had been present at
many such scenes, and the value of life taken had
never weighed on him, nor its memory ever remained
with him, before. In his creed of honour duels were
blameless ; in his country's custom they were habitual.
What long ago had revolted the dashing and daring
spirit (which with many faults and many follies had
something of the old code of the gallant gentlemen
who had fought and died for the White Lilies) had
been the pitiless purpose which he had read ere the
shot had been fired, and which had borne in his sight
the fixed and treacherous intent of the murderer. It
was this which he remembered now.
The throng parted, the knot of ministers separated
Strathmore came forward to go to his carriage, and
Valdor moved also ; they met, as they had done a
hundred times, since that night by the Deer-pond of
the old Bois.
"Ah! you Valdor? Charmed to see you. I had
no idea you were in England, much less at the Levee.
THE CABINET MINISTER. 205
Insufferably warm, isn't it? Such a press!" said
Strathmore, giving his hand to the man who, sixteen
years before, had whispered in his ear, " Fuyez ! il est
mort" unheeded, as he stooped to sever the gold flake
of the hair which trailed among the dark dew-laden
"Such wretched rooms!" laughed Valdor, as he
glanced contemptuously through the reception-cham-
bers, unaltered since Queen Anne. " I only arrived
yesterday. I have come to town on family matters
a disputed inheritance affair. But permit me,
mon ami, to offer my congratulations on your recent
honours; never was a finer political victory won.
Your coup d'etat was supreme !"
Strathmore smiled.
u You give me and my party too much distinction ;
we only effected, dully and slowly, by speeches and
leaders, what you over the water would have done in
a week by a few cannon-balls and closed barrires.
But the British mind refuses the quick argument of
a fusillade as if it were not as wise to be convinced
by a J)ullet as by a newspaper ! Will you do me the
pleasure to drive home with me?"
They pioneered their way through the aristocratic
mob, and reaching the air at last, after the heated
atmosphere of the densely-packed palace, passed to
Strathmore's carriage, while the crowds without, wait-
ing to see the courtiers leave the Lev6e, crushed
themselves close to the wheels, and rushed under the
206 STBATHMORE.
horses' heads, and pushed and jostled, and trampled
each other, in eager curious haste to see the favourite
Minister he who, could he have had his way, would
have ruled them with a rod of iron, and swept his
path clear from all who dared dispute his power, by
the curt Caesarean argument of armed hosts !
" Have you any engagements for to-night, Valdor ?"
he asked, as the carriage moved.
" None. I was going to dine at the Guards' club,
and look in at the Opera/'
"Give me the pleasure of your society, then. I
have a State dinner this evening ; the cruellest penalty
of Place ! Though truly it is selfish, perhaps, to ask
you to throw over that most graceful of all sylphs,
La Catarina, for ministerial proprieties."
u The egotism, at least, does me much honour. I
shall be most happy. Your season is pretty well
over, Strathmore; you eat your farewell whitebait
soon?"
" To-morrow. I shall leave town in a week or two ;
the session will virtually close then."
" Where are you going, apres ? White Ladies ?"
" Not yet. I shall be there the last days in August,
when I hope you will join us. Volms and plenty of
people will be down ; and by all they send me word,
the broods are very abundant and the young deer in
fine condition. No ; I go from town into Devon to
see my mother, stay there three or four days, and
then start for Baden, give a week coming back to
THE CABINET MINISTER. 207
Fontainebleau with His Majesty, your execration,
and to White Ladies by the First." .
"You go into Devon next week?"
" Or the week after. Why ? "
"Because I am bound there. Perhaps you remem-
ber I have English blood in me by the distaff side ?
and there is a property down there which ought, I
think, to be mine by rights, at least it needs looking
into ; pas grand* chose, but valuable to a poor wretch
a million or two of francs in debt. I must make
investigations at your Will Office (' Doctors' Com-
mons,' n'est ce pas? 'Doctors'/ because it has the
testaments of those the doctors have killed; and
' Commons,' because it is common to nobody who
hasn't the money to pay the fees. You English have
a grim humour!). We can go down to the south
together, Strathmore?"
"Certainly." (Valdor did not note that the an-
swer was slightly constrained, and halted a moment.)
"Where is this property you name?"
" Bon Dieu ! I don't know ! The place is peste I
it is in my papers but it is out of my head ! wait a
moment is is Torlynne, surely, or some such title."
"Indeed! That is close to my mother's jointure
house of Silver-rest. I remember it is a disputed
title, an old moated priory with fine timber, but
wholly neglected."
Valdor twisted his scented moustaches with a yawn
of ennui :
208 STBATHMOBE.
" Vous me f aites f r&nir ! What on earth should
I do with a i moated priory? ' It sounds like a ghost-
story ! However, I shall go down and prove my title
if I can ; for I suppose it will sell for something?"
"Undoubtedly. Since you will require to be on
the spot, I am sure I need not say that Lady Castle-
mere will be most happy to see you at Silver-rest, if
you like to stay with us."
Valdor thanked the kindly Fates which thus, by a
fortunate chance, preserved him from the horrors of
Devonian hotels, and accepted Strathmore's invitation,
proffered from a cause he little guessed. Strathmore
had heard of his intended visit to the south with
annoyance, almost, for the instant, with apprehension;
it was this which made him hesitate, and but coldly
consent to the suggestion that they should travel
together. He knew that Valdor had heard those
last words breathed with a broken sigh, "Lucille!
Lucille !" and he dreaded to see the child of Erroll
in the presence of one who had been with him in that
hour. But as instantly he remembered that do what
he would, Valdor, compelled to visit Torlynne, would
certainly pay a visit of compliment to Lady Castle-
mere, and, living on the same solitary shore with
Silver-rest, could not fail to meet Lucille. Therefore,
with that policy which he used in trivial as in great
matters, he disarmed all danger by meeting it ctavance;
any act unusual on his part might have wakened
Valdor's curiosity or wonder concerning the lovely
child whom he would find there as his ward; to in-
THE CABINET MINISTER. 209
vite him at once beneath the same roof with her was
to avoid, entirely, exciting that piqued interest which,
though no link remained to guide him by any possi-
bility towards the truth, might yet have induced him
to inquire much that would have been difficult to
satisfy.
The foresight was wise, the reasoning just, the
inference and expectation both rightly founded ; yet
woe for us, mes f reres ! the surest barriers raised
by men's prevision are but as houses builded on
the sands, which one blast of shifting winds, one
sweep of veering waves, may hurl down into dust.
" What spell have you about you, mon cher ?" said
Valdor, two hours later, in the drawing-rooms of
Strathmore's residence, as he threw himself into
a dormeuse. Time had passed lightly over Valdor,
and left him much the same a gay, debonnaire,
brilliant, French noble, whose fortunes were not equal
to his fashion, in whom a transparent impetuosity
mingled in odd anomaly with the languor of the
world, in whom the fire of the South outlived the in-
differentism of habit, and who, with many follies and
some errors, had honour in his heart and truth in his
tongue. He looked younger than he was, with his
delicate brune tint, his soft, black eyes, his careless
and chivalrous grace ; and the man in whose society
he now was looked on him disdainfully as " bon en-
fant," because his hot passions were short-lived, and
the nonchalance of his nature made him caudid as a
child. f
VOL. II. p
210 STRATHMOEE.
Strathmore raised his eyebrows :
" i Spell V What a romantic word ! How do you
mean it?"
Valdor laughed, throwing back the dark waves of
his hair ; he was a little vain of his personal beauty.
"I mean to account for your perpetual success.
You command success as if you had all the genii of
fable to back you. Men censure you, oppose you,
hate you, inveigh against you, and you have a strong
party of foes, but they never contrive to defeat you." .
" Well, I am not very tolerant of defeat."
"Pardieu! who is? But most of us have to
swallow it sometimes. What I want to know is how
you [succeed in perpetually compelling your enemies
to drink it, and avoiding one drop of the amari aliquid
yourself ! "
Strathmore smiled ; the frank expression of curiosity
and opinion amused him ; he had himself the trained
reticence of the school of Machiavelli, and years had
of necessity polished his skill in the knowledge u how
to hold truth and how to withhold it," once laid down
by him as the first law of wisdom and of success.
" You ask for a precis of my policy ! You know I
invariably contended that what men choose to accom-
plish they may compass sooner or later, if they use just
discernment, and do not permit themselves to be run
away with by Utopian fancies or paradoxical motives.
Let every one make up his mind to be baffled in what
he undertakes nineteen times, but to succeed on the
twentieth; I would warrant him success before he
has reached half the score."
THE CABINET MINISTEB. 211
" That tells me nothing !" said Valdor, petulantly,
though, in truth, it was this very inflexible and long-
enduring patience, which nothing could dissuade or
daunt, that was the key of Strathmore's rise to power.
a Well ! you must keep your secret, mon ami, and I
dare say it has too much science and subtlety in it to
lie in a nutshell. But as for your theory, which
makes one think of the Bruce Spider-tale peste ! it
won't answer always. Look at us ; we persevere for
ever, and never succeed !"
Strathmpre smiled slightly; he knew Valdor re*
ferred to the efforts of his own French party, and
the loyal Utopia of a Quixotic and chivalric clique,
found little sympathy with a statesman the distin-
guishing and most popular characteristic of whose
politics was their entire freedom from all idealogy or
vagueness.
" Mon cher ! I spoke of a man who pursued a cer-
tain definite goal and power for himself, not of those
leagued together for the chase of a shadowy chimera.
To seek a palpable aim and a palpable ascendancy is
one thing; to embrace a visionary crusade and an
ideal flock of theories is another. / mean blasting a
rock with rational materials and science; you mean
climbing the clouds with ropes of sand !"
"Then," said Valdor, impatiently, with a dash of
envy and a dash of intolerance "then it would
appear that the wise man consecrates his labours and
his ambitions to the advancement of himself ; it is
only the fool who wastes both on mankind !"
p2
212 STRATHMORE.
" Certainly," smiled Strathmore. "Who ever
doubted it ?"
At that moment the doors of the vestibule were
thrown open, and the first of the guests bidden to his
State dinner was announced : further tSte-k-tete was
ended.
Strathmore was not popular among his colleagues ;
his personal coldness and his consummate indifference
to how he wounded, repelled men, the generosity of
feeling and the cordiality which in earlier years had
been very strong to the few whom he liked, were
gone. Although his liberality was as extensive, it
seemed rather to proceed from disdain of wealth than
any kindlier feeling, and though at times great and
even noble deeds were traced to him done in privacy,
they appeared rather to come from some rigid law set
to himself N than from any warmer feeling toward
humanity. But his ascendancy was indisputable, his
intellect priceless to his party, and the brilliancy of
his career without a rival ; and men rallied about him,
and confessed his influence as the most prominent
politician of his day, and the assured leader of the
future.
Valdor looked at him as he sat that night at the
head of the table entertaining many of the most dis-
tinguished men of his country and time, fellow-
Ministers and foreign Ambassadors, while the light
from the chandeliers above, flashing off the gold and
silver plate, the many-hued exotics, the snowy Parian
statuettes, and the bright-bloomed fruits, fell upon
THE CABINET MINISTER. 213
his face with its peculiar Vandyke type, in which
were blent the haughty melancholy of Charles
Stuart with the statesmanlike power of Strafford,
the serenity of a fathomless repose with the darkness
of passions untameable if aroused.
Valdor looked at him as Strathmore drank his- Red
Hermitage and exchanged light witticisms with the
French Representative, and again, unbidden and un-
welcome before the thoughtless mercurial mind of the
dashing and languid lioh, rose the memory of that
night in the Boisde Boulogne, and of the tiger-lust
with which the death spasm had been watched to
slacken and grow still.
"He has forgotten !" thought Valdor, with marvel,
admiration, revulsion, loathing, all commingled. " He
slew without pity ; he lives without remorse."
So rashly do men judge who draw inferences from
the surface ; so erringly do they condemn who see not
the solitude wherein the soul is laid bare 1
214
CHAPTER XIX.
AMONG THE LILIES OF THE VALLEY.
The afternoon sun was warm on land and sea, and
a light amber haze was lying on the soft outline of
the hills, the stretches of golden gorse, and the glisten
of the moistened sands, as a steam-yacht which had
come down channel from the Solent, and rounded
the coast, anchored in the little bay of Silver-rest,
where nothing was ever seen save the fishing-smacks
and tiny craft of the scattered population, whose few
rough-hewn shingle cottages nestled under one of the
bluffs.
"There is your Torlynne, Valdor," said Strath-
more, pointing to some gable-ends which arose some
mile or two off in the distance above masses of wood-
land, as they walked up from the shore. They were
expected at Silver-rest, but the day of their arrival
had been left uncertain, as he had not 'known when
he might get finally free. Strathmore allowed him-
AMONG THE LILIES OP THE VALLEY. 215
self little leisure in office ; he never appeared either
hurried or occupied, but he burnt the candle of his
life at both ends, as most of us do in this age, and
must do, if we would be of any note in it.
" Ah, pardieu ! I wish it were an hotel in the Rue
de Grammont instead !" laughed Valdor, as he glanced
across. " Not but that, I dare say I shall never get
it, unless I languish through your Chancery till I am
eighty. I shall hear the verdict is given in my
favour, just when I am receiving the Viaticum ! "
" I hope better things ; it is a vast pity it should
moulder unowned. Meanwhile, the litigation be-
friends me with a most agreeable companion during
my exile at Lady Castlemere's. I fear you will be
terribly bored, Valdor ; my mother lives in strict re-
tirement."
"Another instance of those who once ruled the
world abjuring it in advancing life. What years it
is since I had the honour of seeing her. I was a
little fellow a court-page, proud of my blue and
silver 1 Does she live alone, then ? "
" Oh, no ; merely away from the world. She has
a grandson with her, a lad at college; and also a
ward of hers and of mine, little more than a child as
yet, Lucille de Vocqsal."
" De Vocqsal ? An Austrian name, isn't it ? ?
" No, Hungarian ; it may be Austrian, too, how-
ever is, indeed, -I think, now you name it. You
must expect to find Silver-rest dull it has nothing
to boast of but its sea-board."
216 STBATHMORE.
" And its country," added Valdor, as they passed
through the lodge gates.
Strathmore glanced carelessly over the magnificent
expanse of woodland and moorland, hill and ocean,
which stretched around.
u Yes ; but that has not much compensative attrac-
tion for either you or me, I fancy."
They went on in silence, smoking, through the
grounds, which were purposely left in much of the
wildness and luxuriance of their natural formation,
with here and there great boulders of red rock bedded
in the moss, and covered with heaths and creepers,
and Strathmore looked up in surprise as a sudden
exclamation from Valdor fell on his ear.
" Bon Dieu ! Look there. How lovely ! "
Strathmore glanced to where Valdor pointed, mar-
veiling that the landscape should rouse him to so
much admiration, for the fashionable French Noble
was not likely to be astonished into any enthusiastic
adoration of the pastoral beauty of nature, or the
sun-given smile on the seas.
What he saw was this.
A rock of dark sandstone overhung the turf
below, forming a natural chamber, whose walls were
the dense screen of tangled creepers and foliage
pendent from its ledges, or the great ferns which
reared to meet them^. and whose carpet was the
moss covered with lilies of the valley, which grew
profusely where the tempered sun rays fell through
cool leaves and twisted boughs, flickering and parted-
AMONG THE LILIES OF THE VALLEY. 217
And under its shelter from the heat, half buried in
the flowers, lying in the graceful abandon of a child's
repose, resting her head upon her hand in the atti-
tude of Guido's " Leggiatura," her eyes veiled as
they rested on her book, one sunbeam streaming
through the fan-like ferns above, touching her hair
to gold and shining on the open page she read, was
Lucille.
The steps of both were involuntarily arrested as
they came upon her in her solitude ; there was some-
thing of sanctity in that early loveliness,
Soft, as the memory of buried love ;
Pure, as the prayer which childhood wafts above
that silenced both him to whom it was familiar, and
him to whom it was unknown. Then Strathmore
turned to move onward through the grounds ; he felt
repugnance to break in on her repose, or to meet her
in the presence of the one who had heard the dying
lips faintly whisper the name she bore, in their last
farewell to her lost mother.
But Valdor put his hand upon his shoulder.
" Wait for Heaven's sake 1 Who is she I "
"A lovely child, but no more than that as yet.
My ward, Lucille de Vocqsal."
" Mort de Dieu ! She is the most beautiful poem,
picture Heaven knows what that ever I beheld.
Make her lift those eyes; what must the face be
when they are raised ? "
" You will see her later on," answered Strathmore,
coldly. "I shall not disturb her now; she is very
218 STBATHMOBE.
young, and would not understand our having pryed
on her in her haunt. And pray do not use that
flowery language to her ; youth flattered into vanity
is ruined, and you would talk in an unknown tongue
there"
He moved away, and Valdor, something surprised
and something annoyed, prepared to follow him with
a lingering backward gaze. But it was too late ; a
squirrel swinging downward from the boughs above
made Lucille raise her eyes. She saw Strathmore,
and, with a low cry, wild in its gladness, sprang from
her couch among the lilies, and flew to meet him.
Midway, she saw, too, that he was not alone ; and
paused, hesitating, with the colour, delicate as the
rose flush on a sea shell, deepening in her cheek.
She knew by instinct that Strathmore was haughtily
reticent before all auditors, and although too highly
bred and nurtured to know embarrassment, she had
something of the beautiful wild shyness of the young
fawn with those who were strange to her.
A shudder ran through Strathmore's veins as he
perceived her standing before them there in the
sultry mellow haze ; while the eyes of his companion
rested on her the eyes which had watched with him
the shadows steal over the face, and the convulsion
shiver through the limbs of her father, in the summer-
night of years long gone.
Then he moved forward and greeted her with all
his accustomed gentleness, less tenderly than when
they were alone but to that she had long been used
AMONG THE LILIES OF THE VALLEY. 219
when any other was present at their meeting and
led her towards Valdor.
" Lucille, allow me to introduce to you one of my
oldest and most valued friends."
"Pardieu!" thought the Frenchman; as after a
graceful acknowledgment of his salutation, none the
less graceful, but the more, from that delicate proud
shyness which was like the coy gaze of the deer,
Lucille turned to Strathmore with low, breathless
words of joyous welcome, and the radiance of that
smile at which the sadness fled from off her face, as
though banished by a spell. u Pardieu ! when was
anything more exquisite ever born ; it is not mortal ;
it is the face of an angel. I have seen something
like it, too, somewhere ; now she smiles it looks fami-
liar. Perhaps it is some head of Guido, some fantasy
of Carlo Dolci, that she makes me remember. She
seems to love her guardian ; is she the only thing on
earth he does not ice ? The last man living, I should
have supposed, that would have taken such an office ;
however, it may be done from generosity here.
Strathmore would ruin his friend without mercy
if he stood in his way, or awoke his passions; but
he would give royally to his deadliest enemy who
asked him in need. A bad man sometimes; a
dangerous man always ; but a mean man, or a false
man, never ! "
Which fugitive thoughts flitting through the volar-
tile and reckless mind of Valdor, which seldom stayed
to sift or criticise, were just enough in their deduction,
220 STBATHMORE.
drawing one of those haphazard truths by instinct,
for which patient and shrewd observation often toil
half a lifetime in vain.
" What were you reading there among the lilies of
the valley, Lucille ? " asked Strathmore, as they
passed onward through the grounds, while her head
was ever turning with a graceful, upward movement
to look on him, and her eyes were ever seeking his
with their loving, reverent regard, as though she
could scarcely believe in the actual joy of his pre-
sence. They were but few and rapid visits which
he paid her, but they were remembered passionately
from time to time. The fairest summer lost its
beauty if he never came with its golden promise;
the dreariest winter was glad and bright with all the
warmth of spring in her sight if it brought her but
a few hours of his presence. From the moment
when as a little child on the sea-shore she had asked
him his name that she might say it in her prayers,
Lucille had clung to the memory of Strathmore with
a strange and deepened fondness far beyond her years.
" I had taken ^33schylus and Euripides."
" You can read them in the original then, made-
moiselle ? " asked Valdor, in surprise.
u Lucille learns very rapidly, I believe," answered
Strathmore for her. " She has been taught chiefly
what she fancied to study, and one of those fairy
fancies was Greek. I believe merely because she
had heard how the sea she loves was loved in Hellas
was it not, Lucille ? "
AMONG THE LILIES OF THE VALLEY. 221
She smiled, and looked over to the sunny waters.
"Well ! I can fancy how the Ten Thousand clashed
their bucklers for wild joy, and shouted ' Thalassis !
Thalassis ! ' to the beautiful dancing waves. I love
the ocean ! It is a music that is never silent, a poem
that is never exhausted. When I die I should like
my grave to be beside the sea."
"Death for you, mademoiselle ! " broke in Valdor,
while his eloquent southern eyes dwelt on her with
admiration. " The gods have lavished on you every
fairest gift, but they will be too merciful to those
who look on you, to show their love towards so bright
a life, in the way the Greek poets deemed the
gentlest."
Lucille raised her eyes to his with something of
surprise; she was unused to the suave subtleties of
flattery, while a shadow stole over her face, such as
an artist would let steal over the young face of
Proserpine or of Procris whilst yet they lived their
virginal life amongst the flowers, the shadow of that
unknown future which lay awaiting them coiled in
the folded leaves of yet unopened years.
" I wonder they chose early death as the gentlest
fate," she said, softly; " to die in youth, to leave all the
warmth of life for the loneliness of the grave, to grow
blind to the light of the sun, and deaf to the voices we
' love, and to lie alone there, dead, while the birds are
waking, and the wind is blowing over the flowers, and
the day has dawned for all but us ! Oh, who could
choose it ? "
222 STRATHMORE.
The words, spoken with the unconsciousness of
childhood, yet with the utterance of a poet, were
very touching, and silenced both who heard her ; one
they smote with the memory of that dawn when the
birds had sung under the leaves, and the rejoicing
earth had waked to gladness, and alone amidst that
waking life had lain in rigid stillness the brother he
had slain.
i "She knows nothing of that past story, or she
would not speak thus of death to him," thought
Valdor, moved and impressed by this beautiful child,
whom he had seen among the lilies : she was a study
so new to him.
"^33schylus and Euripides have saddened you,
Lucille," said Strathmore^ as he moved a wild rose-
bough from her path. " Those tragedies of curse
and crime are far too gloomy for you."
" Oh no, I love them!" she answered him, with the
ardent eloquence natural to her, and cultured, not
fettered, by education; "they are grand, they are
like a sea-storm by night ! And they are so human
through their grandeur too ; the Eumenides may be
fable, metaphor, spirit-allegory, what it will, but
while one man sins, Orestes will be mortal, and will
live ? That guilt wrought in a moment's vengeance ;
that burden bound upon the murder for ever; those
ghastly shapes which follow him, though to all other
sight he is alone ; they surely are true for all time
while crime is still on earth !"
AMONG THE LILIES OP THE VALLEY, 223
"And there is a crime yet more accursed than
Orestes' Orestes' victim was guilty!"
Her thoughts had been uttered from an imagination
freshly steeped in the solemn verse of the tragic poet ;
his answer broke, beyond all check of will or power,
from the sleepless remorse of conscience, stung into
ope momentary bitter Me& Culpa.
Past the ear of the young girl it drifted harmless,
revealing nothing, and like an utterance of an un-
known tongue : his companion knew whence the
words sprang, and thought,
" I did him wrong : tliat was remorse."
Strathmore caught his look, and his proud and
disdainful nature shrank in wrath from its generous
compassion. After long years of constant intimacy,
through whose whole tenour this man had never seen
deeper than the rest of the world saw, nor probed his
silken social vest to the iron cross worn beneath,
Strathmore knew that he had betrayed his secret to
him. Sensitive, and intolerant of intrusion, he re-
sented pity yet more than insult.
The clear, silvered moonlight fell on Lucille's face
that evening where she sat beside the open window in
the twilight, which at her entreaty had not yet been
banished from the chamber, though in the inner
drawing-room beyond the chandeliers were lit, and
Valdor and Strathmore' s private secretary were play-
ing closely contested 6cart6.
The stillness was unbroken. Lady Oastlemere sat
224 STKATHMORE.
silent, a stately and noble woman, who bore her
seventy years with dignity, though attenuated by
bodily infirmity; in whose glance was still the fire,
and in whose features the arrogance of earlier years,
though both were tempered now by a touching and
chastened gentleness. Her grandson, Lionel Caryl],
was silent also; though bold and careless enough
ordinarily, he feared his uncle ; to him as to all youths
Strathmore had always been cold and negligent ; in
the presence of the profound man of the world, the
able and subtle statesman, the chill and brilliant
courtier, he felt abashed, shy, ill at ease, and the
polished ice of tone and manner froze the boy's frank
young heart. The stillness was unbroken, save by
the sound of the waves from without, or the noise of
a grasshopper under the leaves, whilst the moon shone
on the silvered sea, calm and phosphor-lighted ; and
Strathmore where he sat looked at Lucille, as, with
her head bowed slightly, and her dark wistful eyes
gazing out on the night, the starry radiance fell about
her.
With much that was dissimilar, she had all the
brightness and delicacy of her fathers beauty, though
upon it was a vague, intangible shadow of sadness, as
though the tragedy of his fate had left an unconscious
melancholy on the life which took its existence from
him. Strathmore saw and noted this ; he had done
so often, and it always smote him with keen dread ;
for every touch of sorrow which could have fallen on
her he would have held as a breach in his fulfilment
AMONG THE LILIES OF THE VALLEY. 225
of her father's trust. His eyes rested on her, and his
thoughts filled with the thronging shapes and memtv
ries of the past. Forbidden intrusion in the press of
the world, trodden down in the path of power, dashed
aside by the mailed hand of a successful and unscru-
pulous ambition, they coiled about him here, and
would not be appeased. While she smiled up into
his face ; while he spoke to her calmly of her father ;
while he bent his will to rivet her affection and her
gratitude, a vain remorse was on him. As in monkish
times, those whose lives were fair in the sight of men,
and who wielded the sword as the sceptre of sway
over the world, came to the dark sepulchre and the
blood-steeped scourge for their chastisement, so he
came for his into the fair and innocent presence of
this young life.
He sat long silent, looking on, her where she gazed
out to the moonlit sea, his thoughts in the travail of
the past ; and he slightly started as his mother, who
was near him, spoke :
" Lucille will soon cease to be a child !"
"Not yet not yet!" he answered hastily, and
almost with pain. " In Heaven's name, let her guard
her childhood over all the years she can !"
" Surely, but it will flee of itself beyond our arrest.
One touch will soon scare it for ever."
" Accursed be the touch that does !"
Lionel Caryll heard, and looked at him, and the
young man shuddered as he caught the look on
Strathmore's face; he did not know that the sole
VOL. II. Q
4*6 OTBATHMOBE.
feeling which prompted Strathmore's wards whs a
passionate wwh that the childhood flo -easy to giad-
den, so easy to shield could fee prolonged for ever;
a passionate fear, which crossed him Cor the moment,
left, when she should be no longer child but woman,
others beyond hk control should make shipwreck of
the Kfe in whose innocence, peace, and protection
his atonement lay.
Their words did not reach her ear, but the sound
of them roused her from her reverie, and die -came
and knelt before him with her hands crossed on his.
* Lord Oecil, I have something to beg of you."
He looked *down into her large soft eyes.
"Of me, Lucille? You know you never ask in
vain."
She laughed with a child's gay joy.
* Ah, how good you arel I want you to let me
come and see White Ladies?"
White Ladies 1 Why there t"
"Because it is your home. It is not far away,
and I should so love to 'see it. It must be such a
grand and stately place, with its dbisters and its
forests? I have road of it in the archives, and chro-
nicles, and legends. I know them afi by heart ! And
they frighten me, some of them that one, with its
terrible burden :
Swift silent Strafhmore's eyes
Are f athomkw and darkly wise,
No wife nor leman sees them smile,
Save at bright Bteel 'or -statecraft wile,
And when they lighten foes are 'ware,
The shrive is short the shroud is there !
AMONG THE ULIBS OF THE VALLEY. 227
It is net true of the name either now. Your eyes
are not cruel, and your hand never harmed any 1"
The innocent, half-laughing words struck him like
a dagger's thrust; the legend on her lips which had
been on Marion Vavasour's, prophetic of the guilt
into which his passion and a woman's lie would hurl
him! The sickly memory of the Domino Blanc
passed over him ; more horrible in all its remembered
brilliance and beguiling, than any see&fes of misery
and torture. He heard the very ling of the masker's
laugh, so mockingly sweet, so luiingly fatal 1 He
lived in that hour again fresh as though it had been
but yesterday I He shuddered, and in die moonlight
the pale bronze of his cheek grew whiter ; but Strath-
more, a courtier and a statesman, had not now to
learn the lesson of self-control, of calm impassibility.
He smiled :
"Why take pleasure in those dark legends of a
benighted age, Lucille? they have nothing in com-
mon with you, you fair child I What I have brought
you befit you much better. Come, let us see how you
like them !"
He stretched out his hand, and took from the table,
where he had lain them earlier in die evening, some
cases of pink pearls as costly in their value as they
were delicate in setting and in hue ; he was prodigal
of all that could either amuse or adorn her, but, from
her age, these were the first jewels he had brought
her, and, stooping, he clasped their bands of gold
upon her arms, throat, and hair. The white moon-
228 STRATHMOKE.
light fell about her where she knelt before him, on the
graceful abandon of her attitude, on her face, up-
raised as a child lifts it in prayer, and he watched the
flush on her cheeks, the breathless pleasure on her
lips. Every time he saw her glance lighten, and her
lips laugh, through Aim, he felt that so far the trust of
Erroll was fulfilled, that so far his atonement was
wrought out, that so far his expiation might claim to
wash out the sin.
" Ah ! how beautiful they are, and how kind of
you to bring them!" she whispered him, rapidly and
caressingly. "You have always some new thought
for me. Look how they gleam and glisten in the
moonlight ! What jewels are they ? They have the
blush of a wild-rose "
"And of your cheek," said Strathmore, with a
smile
She laughed : reared in innocence and seclusion,
she was wholly unaware of her own loveliness, and
flattery had never polluted her ear nor profaned her
heart. She had the fairest charm of youth uncon-
sciousness. Then her eyes, uplifted to his, grew
earnest; she leaned slightly forward towards him,
and her voice changed from its breathless pleasure to
a tender and almost saddened earnestness :
" Ah ! how good and generous you are to always
give me pleasure; and yet, do you know do you
know I sometimes wish you did not give me half so
much, that I might show you better how Lucille loves
you ! I sometimes wish that you were not rich and
great, but poor, so that you might know how little it
AMONG THE LILIES OF THE VALLEY. 229
is these I care for ; a lily of the valley, a heron's
feather, a forest squirrel from White Ladies, would
be as dear to me if from your hand. It is so little to
love those who give us joy ; the proof of love is to
endure in pain ! "
" God forbid that you should prove yours so !"
Her words moved him ; any evidence of her affec-
tion was welcome for the sake of the dead, yet every
evidence of it struck him with a pang of remorse.
This child, who caressed his hand as the one from
which she received all joy and blessing, would have
shuddered in horror from its touch had she known
the life it had blasted from earth !
" Do not wish that, Lucille," he added, gently. "I
need no proof of what I know. Remember, I read
your heart like an open book, and can see all that is
written there."
She smiled, a sweet and trustful smile.
"Yes! I forgot; only sometimes I wish that I
could prove it to you. While you make me so happy,
what value is there in gratitude? The very dogs
love the hand that feeds them ! But, Lord Cecil, you
have not told me may I come to White Ladies ? "
" Some day, perhaps."
But as Strathmore put her tenderly aside, and rose
to approach his mother, he thought, with a shudder,
of the dark shadow which lay athwart that threshold,
making it impure for her fair and innocent youth to
cross. White Ladies! where a fatal love had
trampled aside all laws of hospitality and honour;
where the beginning of that ghastly tragedy had
230 BTEATHKQKE.
opened, only to close when the sun weak dawn upon
his wrath, and the dying sigh trembled through the
silence; where her father's memory filled every
chamber, haunted every familiar place, and peopled
the vacant air, with the thronging phantoms of a vain
remorse I
As he had entered the room from that beyond, having
finished his game, Valdor had overheard her request,
and had noted the manner in which it was received.
" She has never seen White Ladies, and he will
not have her there! It is strange!" thought the
Parisian, struck by the circumstance, as he might
never have been but that the fair face which he had
beheld first among the lilies, had wakened a new and
deepening interest in him. Lucille was so unlike all
he had ever seen.
"Your ward is very lovely, Strathmore," he said
that night, as they walked up and down the lawn
under the limes smoking. u She reminds me of some
one, I cannot for the life of me think whom. Can
you help me % n
"Not at alL It is rather an uncommon style of
beauty," answered Strathmore, indifferently, while
swift to his own memory swept the recollection of
that sunset hour when Valdor had watched the death-
spasm convulse the face whose features she took, and
the death film gather over the eyes from which her
own had their smile.
u True. But I have seen some one like her," per-
sisted Valdor. " Did I ever know her parents V 9
AMONG THE LILIES OT THE VALLEY. 231
u Very possibly. Bat Both died so many years, ago*
that it k not Kkely r I fancy, that yon would recal
them."
The answer was negligently given, as in a matter
of smalL moment^ yet in no way as though he avoided
the inquiry ; for thoogh his earlier regard for truth
had not worn away, the profound and acute mind of
the politician had dealt too long in finesses not to
deem them legitimate under private or public ne-
cessity.
a De Vocqsal," repeated Valdor, musingly. "She
was of Hungarian birth r I think you said ? May one
ask, without intruding, anything more? "
" Of course, my dear Valdorl" said Sfarathmore,
surprkedly^ with his slight,, cold smile. " You speak
as though Lucille were some enehanted princess t
But there is little to learn. Her name you know ; she
lost her parents in her infancy ; I and my mother are
her guardians. What remains I She is still a child 1 "
"But a lovely me, pordieu!" laughed Valdor,
thinking to himself that he had been a fool building
up a* mare's-nest, tt Do you know that I have actually
been bfite enough t suspect you of a nearer tie ta
her. I fancied she might be your daughter."
Strathmore smiled:
" Mon chir I your imagination has run riot ! That
my mother^ home, is hers might have assured you of
the legitimacy of her birth."
The Comte laughed gaily:
" Of course ! and / should be the kst to wonder
232 STRATHMORE.
at a generosity in you. But one question more!
Why will you not let her go to White Ladies! I
could hardly help echoing her prayer myself."
" She may go, certainly, but she is almost too
young to be brought out at present; and White
Ladies, whenever I am down, is as completely i the
world ' as the London season ; seen there, she might
as well be presented at once. However, she must
very soon be both ; but the question of when, is
more for my mother's adjustment than mine. I
do not think it is for a young girl's happiness to begin
womanhood, coquetry, heart-burnings, and late hours
too soon ; but most likely women differ from me,"
He spoke negligently, with easy indifference, as
men speak of a trifle which, turn whatever way it
may, will have no import to them, and Valdor dis-
missed his supposed secret as a chimera. But as they
parted that night, Strathmore's eyes followed him
with their dangerous and merciless light lit in them ;
the mere interrogations had aroused his wrath, and
aroused with it insecurity and suspicion. " He meant
no more than he said. He is as transparent as glass !"
he thought, with the disdain which a reserved and
self-contained mind entertains for a frank and unre-
served one. " It is impossible he can fancy the truth ;
the likeness in her is not strong enough to suggest it ;
even if it did it could never go beyond fancy. There
would be nothing to support it, nothing to corroborate
it. Yet if I thought there were a fear, I would find
some means to stop his babble."
The thought did not travel further, and did not
AMONG THE LILIES OP THE VALLEY. 233
take definite shape or meaning; it was only the
vague shadowing of an impalpable dread, but it was
coloured by that inexorable pitilessness which swept
from his path all that obstructed it, the pitilessness
which made at once the force of his career and the
evil of his character. His yearning to work out ex-
piation through the living to the dead was holy in its
remorse ; such may well claim to wash away and to
atone for the deadliest sin that can rest upon the
soul of any man. But this is the greatest evil which
lies in evil, the ashes of past guilt are too often
the larvae of fresh guilt, and one crime begets a
brood, which, brought to birth, will strangle the life
in which they were conceived.
That night, after her attendant had left her,
Lucille, who felt wakeful, she knew not why, threw
open one of the casements of her bed-chamber and
leaned out, resting her cheek on her hand, and her
eyes on the moonlit seas, lying wide and bright in
the stillness of the summer night, with here and
there, against the starry skies, the dark sail of a
coasting vessel gliding slowly and silently. A child
in years, she had the heart of a poet ; and that vast
limitless ocean in serenity and storm, in the tempest
of black midnights, and the calm of holy dawns, had
been a living poem to her from her infancy; in-
deed the beautiful myths, and the idyllic dreams
she drew from it, had much to do with deepening
the susceptibility of a nature already too poetic and
too ethereal for its own peace and its own welfare.
234 STRATHKOBE.
She leaned out, under the leaves and clematis-
flowers, clustering about her window, while her hair,
flung backward, fell unbound over her shoulders,
and her deep wistful eyes travelled over the starlit
Atlantic, whose ceaseless melody swelled upward from
the beating surge, through the quiet of the night.
As she rested there, two shadows passed before her
sight ; one crossing the sward under the limes below,
another passing before the lighted casements of a.
chamber in a wing, built out, so that divided by a
lawn, it stood opposite to her. The first was Lionel
Caryll, smoking, and walking backwards and for-
wards there, with all a youth's romance, to watch the
light which shone from her window, through the cle-
matis-clusters, while he mused vaguely, timidly, of
what he loved this fair child too reverently, to dare
draw out from the golden haze of an immature
dream which could not call itself a hope. The
second was Strathmore, who, in this brief break upon
his life of feverish power and unceasing conflict,
could not wholly abandon the habits of his accus-
tomed sphere, nor cease wholly to work the wheels
within wheels of a keen ambition and a ruthless
statecraft, but who, pacing to and fro his chamber,
dictated to his secretary the verbal subtleties of a
foreign correspondence. The two shadows crossed
her sight ; the moon-rays fell on young CarylTs face,
lending it much of delicacy and sadness, as his steps
sounded slowly one by one upon the stillness ; and
the strong waxlight within showed Strathmore's pro-
file distinct, as though cut on an intaglio, as he
AMONG THE LILIES OF THE VALLEY. 235
passed swiftly up and down before the open windows,
the countenance full of haughty intellect and lofty
power, like the face of the man, whose iron brain
framed, and whose iron hand would have carved out
the blood-system of "Thorough" master of all men,
save of himself !
On the two the innocent eyes of the young girl
fell, as she looked into the night, and away across
the starlit ocean; and on the one they scarcely
glanced, but on the other they lingered long.. It was
not on the youth a& he paced under the windows,
keeping fond yet holy watch on the light of her case-
ment, and dreaming over thoughts hardly less guile-
less than her own, that Lucille looked, but on the
worn and unrevealing face of the statesman, cold in
its power, dark in its written record of spent passions,
as he consumed the sleepless hours of the gentle night
in the exercise of a restless and dominant ambition.
She lingered there long, and wistfully, hidden in the
shroud of fragrant clematis, and her eyes never wan-
dered from that resting place ; then she gently closed
the window, and over her face was a deep and loving
tenderness, a hush of sweet unutterable joy that
smiled on her lips and filled her eyes with unshed
tears.
a How great he is and how good ! * she whispered
softly to herself. And then she knelt down beside
her bed, with her hands crossed on her heart, and her
young face upraised, and, even as she had done from
infancy, prayed to God for Strathmore.
236
CHAPTER XX.
ONE OF THE LEGION OF THE LOST.
In a bed-chamber au deuxi&me, in a house in the
Rue Beaujon, Champs Elys6es, sat a woman, while
in the street below rattled the wheels of .passing car-
riages, and through the windows little was seen save
leaden roofs, and dripping water-pipes, and dreary-
skies, for the day was wet and cheerless. The cham-
ber was luxurious to a certain extent, if something
too glittering and meretricious ; the hangings were of
rose tendre; ormolu, buhl, rosewood, marqueterie,
porcelaine de Sfevres, were not wanting ; and cache-
mires, sables, flowers, objets d?art y were scattered over
it, the offerings of those young lions who were anxious
to have their names associated with one who had been
the most notorious and dazzling star of the demi
monde years ago, and who, even yet, by a resistless
spell of fascination, was as costly to them as the
Baccarat, and the Lansquenet, and the Rouge et
ONE OP THE LEGION OP THE LOST. 237
Noir, which drew thousands of francs from their
pockets in the midnight privacy of her salon. Out
of the hed-chamber opened the drawing-room and the
supper-room, both furnished in the same style ; with
warm nuances of colour, which struck the eye plea-
santly; with carefully-shaded light, which cast its
own twilight here upon everything ; with an ensemble
which looked glowing and illusive when the apart-
ments were lit, and scented with dreamy odours of
pastilles, and redolent of the bouquets of rich wines
and the smoke of chillum from eastern hookahs. On
the dressing-table of the bed-chamber lay many
jewels, chiefly inimitable counterfeits, for the originals
of most had been parted with for two-thirds their
value as soon as received, and paste was all which
glittered there in company with the cases of rouge,
cosmetiques, pearl-powders all the dreary pitiful
paraphernalia of the life which masks the youth it
has lost, and dares not, or cannot, wear the dignity of
coming age, but only hideously masks the tread of
time, and wreathes a death's-head in an unreal smile !
And by the table sat a' woman., It was but noon,
and she w^s alone ; the pigments and powders of the
toilette-table had not yet been used, and they were
sorely needed. Needed to lend their bloom to the
hot, parched lips, their lie to the haggard and faded
brow, their blush to the hollowed cheek, their lustre
to the heavy eyes. Needed for in this face there
was such still splendid remnant of bygone loveliness
as will linger in the discoloured petals of a flower
238 stbjlihmobe.
which lias been trodden and trampled in the mud finch
trace of a brilliant and matchless beauty too great far
any age to utterly sear out, as only seared to make the
wreck more bitter such straying rays still lingering
of the gracious glory with which Nature had once
dowered her peerless work, as only made the souls of
young and virginal women, who passed ier in the
crowd, vaguely shudder ait all which had been thus
lost, thus sullied, thus debased. And this was Marion
Vavasour I
Where had fled the dazzling radiance which had
seemed of old to fill her face and form with Kght ?
Where had fled the haughty grace with which she
had swept through the presence-chambers of Courts,
bending monarchs to her will ? die superb triumph
which had wantoned on her lips, and sat throned
upon her brow ? the lovely youth which bad beamed
from her antelope eyes, and smiled in her sparkling
wit? the resistless sorcery with which she had bought
the souls of men at her will, when the night4uminanoe
streamed on the diamonds flashing in her glittering
hair, or the gladness of the morning fell about her
where she stood, wreathed in the fragrant clusters of
her summer-roses? Where? Where all things fall !
into the grave of Time, which, ever full, yet ever
yawns for more into the abyss which waits for the
Womanhood that is sullied, and sin-steeped, and gives
its glorious dawn and noon to sowing broadcast seeds
of evil whose deadly harvest ever ripens, and is reaped
by its sower in the dark vale of waning years.
ONE OF THE LEGION OF THE LOST. 539
FadUs descensus Avernue. Down down even as
one slips down a, shelving and glassy slope the Dis-
cwwmed had fallen, slowly yet surely, for there are
no resting-places on that road; once launched, there
is no refuge, save in the chasm below. The fate to
which an inexorable vengeance had doomed her had
been hers, and would be hers until the uttermost
letter of its pitiless Mosaic law had been fulfilled.
Dethroned, disgraced, exposed, mocked, reviled, strip-
ped of her power, and stricken into poverty and
shame, there was but one fate for this wanton, mer-
ciless, beautiful, evil woman the sorceress in angel
guise, the destroyer veiled in lovely youth, the belia
demonia am tmge&co riso*
Not for her the purging bitterness of shame, the
purifying fires of remofse, the acrid yet holy tears of
like Magdalen, whose heart whilst crime-riven is con-
trite. Not for her: she knew humiliation, but she
knew nothing of repentance ; she only knew revenge.
She suffered: but not with the suffering which on
the ashes of guilt raises the sanctuary of expiation,
Perhaps, had mercy been yielded to her prayer in the
hour of her extremity, had she been humbled to the
earth with the god-like forgiveness which would have
speared her, and bade her "go, and sin no more," the
faint rays of purer light which here and there strayed
across her soul might have dawned clearer and
gfcromj^r, and have saved het Perhaps 1 Few are
bo deeply lost that an infinite mercy cannot do some-
thing to restore them. It had been denied her, and
240 STRATHMORE.
#
Marion Vavasour from that hour gave herself up to
dazzling evil, and steeped herself recklessly in that
gilded degradation which ere then she had shrunk
from, and drank to the lips of guilty pleasure, and
used her beauty with fearful and pitiless power to
accurse her own soul and all others that she drew
into the Circean tempting.
And therefore was she thus now, fifteen long years
after. For the riches of sin flee swif tly\ scattered in
a mad extravagance; and as her beauty stole away
before the step of time, so stole her power with it; so
she sank downward in that decline whence there is
no ascent ; so she drifted swiftly and surely over fc the
passage of years from brilliance and sovereignty and
evil sway, towards that dark and lonely end which he
who drove her forth to her fate ordained to her in
words which needed *no prophet's preiscience to give
them their prediction. And therefore she was thus
now.
She sat alone, whilst over the stove the chocolate
simmered, and without the ceaseless pouring of the
rain dripped wearily. Where were her thoughts?
Away in that glad omnipotent time when she had
reigned wheresoever she moved, commanded where-
soever her brilliant glance fell; when the riches of
empires and the mines of both hemispheres had been
rifled to adorn that marvellous loveliness which kings
adored; when she had listened to the nightingales
among the fragrant aisles of her rose-gardens with
that soft poetry which made her deadliest spell, her
ONE OF THE LEGION OF THE LOST. 241
most seductive veil ; when she had seen princes bend-
ing to her feet, and royal women outshone by the
glory of her face, while Europe babbled of her fame ?
Surely : they wandered far back over the past as she
sat there, with no companion in her solitude, save the
drip, drip, drip of the unceasing rain from the black
leaden roofs without: wandered far, while in the
columns of the Patrie, which she was wearily glancing
through, her eyes rested on one name :
" Strathmore."
And that name was associated with dignity, with
honour, with a wide renown, with the great policies
of Europe, with all which encircles the career of a
dominant and successful statesman. What weakness
was there in this patrician power, what crevice in this
blade-proof mail, what flaw in this haughty and in-
accessible life, through which the bolt of a woman's
retaliation could speed its way to the quick?
None ! none !
It had baffled her hopelessly through all these
years, which to her had been a gradual descent from
empire into impoverishment, which to him had been
a gradual ascent from ambition up to power. Yet
she had held it in close sight persistently. For there
is nothing at once so hopeless and so persistent as a
vague, shapeless, impotent, yet undying, desire for
Eevenge. All these years she had had watch kept
on him, and through them all she had failed to dis-
cover one aperture through which the adder of retalia-
tion could worm its way and leave its venom. Yet
VOL. II. R
242 STRATHMOKE*
she bad never given up hope ; she had never surren-
dered her search ; for I have said that in the mature
of this woman there was much of the panther, its
cowardice, its velvet softness, its cruelty, its wanton
love of destruction ; and, like the panther, she lay in
wait.
Her eyes rested now on the word u Strathmore ;*
honour, dignity, power, sway, these were what she
beheld ever paid to him, gathered by him, become
alike the mistress and the ministers of the man who
had once been the abject slave of her caress and her
word. Their parts had changed ; he had hurled his
tyrant down into the dust, and stood afar off afar as
though their lives had never touched where her
passionate hatred, her burning bitterness, could no
more assail him, than the fever of fretting breakers
the icy summits of mountains above them. And
a hopeless sickness, a faint despair came over
her, as her eyes gazed upon his name. Should she
never reach him, should die never gather up from the
wreck of the past, sufficient of the force, the power,
the will of Marion Vavasour to smite that steel-clad
life, that soul of bronze, even as he had smitten hers,
to make him reel and stagger beneath her blow, even
though to compass his destruction she herself might
perish 1
With a passionate gesture she crushed the journal
in her hand, and threw it from her ; her lips set, her
eyes gleamed, her hands, so fair and delicate still,
clenched with convulsive force, and in her teeth she
muttered thirstily, dreamily :
ONE OF THE LEGION OP THE LOST. 243
"It mast come, it shall! *Tout vient k point k
qui salt attendre ! ' "
And then she arose and went before her toilette-
mirror, aaid, leaning her head upon her hands, sighed,
whilst a hot, arid mist gathered in her eyes : far more
cruel to her than death or shame, or privation, was
the loss of her glad and glorious loveliness.
" Oh ! woman, woman, you miserable insect-thing !"
she said, bitterly, while her old mocking smile came
about her lips, but now derisive and now joyless.
"Only born to pander to men's pleasure only
created to intoxicate their senses and to damn their
souls what are you worth what are you worth?
A butterfly of less value than a dead leaf, when one
short summer has stolen your beauty ! You reign by
the brightness of the eyes, the bloom of the cheek,
the whiteness of the bosom, and when those are gone
you may lie in a kennel and die. What are your
victories ? Only such as drink, or dice, or the Turf
win as completely I What are your slaves? Only
those who are the slaves not of you, but of their own
passions ! Impotent, wretched, ephemeral thing !
only loved for the vice you gratify, only of worth
while there is youth on your lips ! "
The mocking, scorning words broke out with the
pride and the eloquence of long-past years; to her
heart she felt their truth.
"And yet and yet," she muttered, " it is power
while it lasts. To see them, as I have seen, thirst for
a glance and hang on a smile, and love a sneer, a re-
r2
244 STRATHMOBE.
buff, a cruelty rather than no word ! To make them,
as I have made, kneel and pray, and grovel in the
dust to kiss one's feet ; and bend their proud necks to
the yoke, and break their stern souls down to a
s paniel's humility ; and deal out anguish and despair,
heaven and hell, at will. Ah ! it is Power ! None
wider, none surer on earth, while it lasts ! "
The words were passionate now and triumphant;
for the instant she lived again in the rich and royal
Past, and tasted all its glories. Then her head sank,
and the salt tears filled her eyes, and her hot pale
lips qnivered, and a piteous, wailing cry broke from
her:
" Oh, my lost beauty my lost beauty ! "
And then after a while she took up the rouge, and
the powders, and the paint, and sought wearily and
futilely to counterfeit all which had fled for ever;
and when she arose after that ghastly task, through
all, despite all, there was something beautiful still;
the haughty grace, the antelope eyes, the sovereign
glance, the perfect form, these naught could wholly
destroy save death; but it was only such fugitive,
sullied, faintly-lingering beauty as made the history
it told more bitter and heart-sickening ; as would lin-
ger about the golden cup which had been bruised,
and polluted, and burned in the fire, as would remain
to the glorious statue which had been defaced and
overthrown in ruins in the dust, as would be given
by the painter of the Purgatorio to the faces of the
fallen and accursed as they bear their doom.
245
CHAPTER XXI.
THE SHADOW OF THE FUTURE.
The slimmer morning broke warm and clear over
the western coast, and Strathmore, as he rose and
dressed, bade his servant set the windows open. The
ocean sparkled in the light, the birds sang among the
leaves, the golden gorse blossomed far and wide over
the bluffs and moors ; but in his youth he had had
little sight or heed for these things : he had none
now; the fairness of the opening day he barely
noticed. But beneath his windows rose another song
than that of the thrushes, as sweet as they and as
joyous ; the song of a young heart and a young voice
rising up to heaven with the early day, with the
fragrance of the flowers, with the freshness of the
dew, with the odour of the grasses, with all things
fair and pure. It was the invocation of the Spirits
to the Hours, from Shelley's " Prometheus : "
246 STRATHMORE.
The pine-boughs are singing
Old songs with new gladness,
The billows and fountains t
Fresh music are playing,
Like the notes of a spirit from land and from sea.
And the words, with the improvised music, uprose on
the air as a lark rises into the clouds.
He heard it, and approached the window ; in the
sunlight Lucille was bending down among the flowers
like Milton's Proserpine,
Herself the fairest flower ;
filling her hands with their fragrant wealth, with
golden laburnums, snow-white lilies, roses dew-laden,
buds nestled in their dark wet leaves, and drooping
coils of scarlet creepers. He stood and watched her
where she moved in all the gladness of her youth and
the brightness of the morning, among the boughs and
blossoms, while the burden of her song echoed upon
the air, and the sunny warmth of light fell on the
fairness of her face. He watched her, and over the
world-worn coldness of his face a strange softness
trembled, and into his calm pitiless eyes came a
yearning pain he thought of the dead. He had
loved him, he had been loved by him so well ! and
across the dreary stretch of years no cry of a vain
agony could reach, to pierce the tomb where he had
been hurled in all his glad and gracious manhood.
The life lay rotted to ashes in the grave; what avail
the passionate throes of a remorse, impotent, tardy,
powerless with God or man? Remorse could not
bring back the dead] Yet remorse ate into his soul
THE SHADOW OF THE FUTUBE. 24.7
as the brand burned into the brow of Cain*; with him
by night and day, beside him in the glitter of courts,
lying in wait for him in his solitude, consraning his
peace under the purples of power, it burned ever in
him ; this remorse, hidden under an armour of steel,
veiled from men's sight- beneath a powerful, success-
ful, impenetrable career. And into his eyes now,
there came a weary, passionate, yearning grief, as he
gazed down upon the young life which had sprung
from that of the lost, where she stood among the
flowers with the joyous echo of her song floating
softly down the air; and his lips moved in an uncon-
scious, broken prayer, as though that prayer could
reach the grave.
""My friend, my brother! I will guard her without
shade or soil, her life shall be before my own. Oh
God ! may not that suffice V 9
" Lucille will soon be a child no longer."
His mother spoke again the same words as she had
spoken the night before, where she stood in the em-
brasure of one of the oriel windows, a woman aged,
but of nojble presence still, m carriage and in feature
not unlike to Marie Antoinette, with her silvered hair
turned back from a haughty brow, and the sweeping
folds of her black robes draping a form bowed but
full of dignity ; for Lady Oastlemere had been the
proudest woman of her day until the steel of her will
had been bent and softened in the fires of calamity
and the crucible of age. Strafthmore stood opposite
248 STBATHMOBE.
to her, leaning against the casement; it was near
sunset, and they were alone. He looked up from
what he was reading :
" Unhappily, yes."
"And she has great loveliness, Cecil ?"
" Very great ; she has had from childhood."
" Then we must not always imprison it here ? In
a year or so at latest she should see some other
world than that of a solitary sea-shore, some other
society than that of her birds, and dogs, and flowers.
Your wish, of course, decides all concerning her, but
neither your duty nor mine would be fulfilled if we
denied her for ever any other sphere than this."
Strathmore was silent some moments ; he felt an
invincible reluctance to realise the truth that Lucille
was growing out of childhood ; a yet greater to give
the signal for the flight of all that, made her as glad
and as innocent as a child, by her introduction into a
world where she would learn her own loveliness, be
sullied by flattery, see hollowness, artifice, frivolity,
all of which she never dreamt now, and be taught
either joy from other hands than his own, or the pain
from which he would have no power to shield her.
" Some time yes," he answered, slowly ; " though
she will learn nothing by wider freedom save what is
best unlearnt. She must be introduced, and presented,
and all the rest, of course ; but there is no haste for
that. She is so young yet ; and whilst she is happy
here, she is better here."
His mother was silent too for a while. I have said
THE SHADOW OF THE FUTUBE. 249
that Strathmore had at no time given her more than
a chill regard and a courteous respect ; he was not a
man to be bound by or to feel any of these ties, but
she loved him loved him better since she had shud-
dered at his crime and aided his atonement. She was
silent; then she moved towards him, and laid her
hand lightly on his shoulder, a hand like his own
long, fair, delicate to the touch, yet never to be shaken
from its grasp, the hand which seems instinctively
formed to hold Power.
" Strathmore, forgive me if what I say pains you ;
you know how deeply I should grieve to do so ; but as
Lucille grows older, a question occurs to me which I
never remembered during her infancy. All those who
see her, believe her parentage foreign, and never
dream of looking beyond the fact that she is an
orphan, and a ward of yours and of mine. But if
men meet her who learn to love her, they may look
closer, and to whosoever becomes her husband in the
f uture you must tell the history of her true name and
fate." "
Strathmore almost started, and a Ipok of distaste
and repugnance passed over his face : the young lif e
which had been to him like a child-angel of atonement
looked to him too sacred for the sensual thoughts of
love to approach, or the touch of a lover's kiss to
profane.
"Love? Marriage? They are desecration to
associate with that young innocent child," he said,
impatiently. "Let her love, as she does, the waves
50 STEJLTHMOEE.
tod the birds and die flowers; they are the only
things pure enough for her. Oar brute passions have
nothing in common with her."
"Still unless she were consigned to conventual
seclusion it will be impossible to prevent the love of
men from fastening on her by-and-by !"
u True : but it will be time enough to speak of that
whenever her own heart is touched."
There was the look in his eyes which ever came
there when his will was crossed; but Lady Castle-
mere's will was as resolute as his own. She pursued
the subject :
u But in the event I name, to one to whom Lucille
may be betrothed in the future, her parentage must
be made known. Has this never struck you ? "
" I see what you mean ; but it shall never be so."
The reply was calm, but it was inflexible. In Ids
heart he swore that noroe should ever leam that fatal
secret, none ever glean the power to unfold to her
that he whom she caressed and revered, and honoured
and prayed for as the guaudian and giver of her every
joy, had been the destroyer of her father.
u But how can it be avoided? "
In his cold fathomless eyes she saw the evil look
glitter darker and darker, which would have been
restrained to none save herself, and he answered her
chillily :
" With that I will deal whenever the time comes,
Suffice it, I shall never permit any to learn a secret
THE SHADOW OF THE FUTUBE. 251
which is buried for ever, as much by his will as by
mine."
She mused a moment oyer his words :
"Then," she said, slowly, "then Lucille must
wed with some one who must love her too well to ask
her descent ; there are few who love thus, Strath-
more."
He looked at her in impatience, in surprise, in
curiosity :
" Why talk of love at all ? To think of marriage
for her looks to me as premature, as it seems pollution!
In the seclusion in which you live here you select all
her acquaintance, and she meets none who can whisper
to her of what she does not herself dream."
" Perhaps not ; but there is one here who may
do so."
"Here?"
" Yes ; my grandson loves her ; he scarce knows it
himself, they have been so long together, from her
infancy ; but I know it ; and some hour or other, un-
premeditated and involuntarily, he may discover his
own secret and utter it to her."
" A boy's puling fancy ! a lad's moonstruck sick-
ness ! Why have him here if he must taint the air
she breathes with the miserable maundering of senti-
ment?"
He spoke with intolerant, contemptuous impatience,
his slight, bitter smile upon his lips, chill and disdain-
ful ; it incensed him more than he showed, that this
252 8TBATHM0RE.
youth should have dared to dream of love in associa-
tion with Lucille, should have dared to desecrate with
his amorous follies the opening life which seemed too
pure for any coarser touch of earth.
" My home is Lionel's," answered Lady Castlemere,
briefly' and coldly, for her grandson was as dear to her
as Lucille in truth, more so. " What he feels for
her would not merit the harsh and scornful words you
give to it; his love is like much first love, # timid,
shrinking, delicate, most reverential. He would
breathe no word in her ear he would not speak in my
presence, and he holds her in most perfect tenderness.
It is an affection which has grown with his growth ;
he is not conscious yet of its force ; but a word, a
moment, may reveal his own heart to him, and then
I cannot answer for his silence."
" Secure it then. Send him on the Continent, or
to Egypt, till the Oxford Term. I forbid a boy's
maudlin sentimentality to desecrate her ear."
" Nello's love is purer than most older men's !" said
his mother, with a sigh. "And I do not see the
necessity to banish it wholly until we know that she
would not respond to it "
" Eespond to it !"
Strathmore echoed the words half in derision, half
in incredulity, wholly with anger; around Lucille the
only holy feeling which his nature had ever known
had gathered so much that was hallowed, pure, and
of profound sadness, that for any passion to approach
her seemed like profanation, and for any other hand
THE SHADOW OF THE FUTURE. 253
to attempt to wrest her from his guardianship looked
sacrilegious theft.
" Why should she not ? Though a boy to you, he
is not so to her. She feels for him a loving affection,
born with infancy, which may well deepen into what
would be the safest and happiest love which she can
know. His character is known to me as no other's
can be ; it is one to which her peace might be securely
trusted ; and with him the impediment which would
surely arise with any other man could not occur ; he
would never dream of inquiring more deeply into her
history. There are many reasons that induce me to
think Nello's love if she can feel any for him
would be the calmest haven we could secure for her.
I leave the matter in your hands, you are her guardian ;
but I know that her happiness and peace are too para-
mount with you for you not to weigh them well.
Pardon me if I suggest, Cecil, that it would be well
neither to fetter her until she is old enough to know
her own heart, and has had larger experience, nor, on
the other hand, to banish wholly either him from her,
or hope from him, lest thus you should shipwreck what
else would be a tranquil and shadowless love ? These
matters seem beneath you, but they are not so, since
you have made that young child's peace your care."
"Nothing is beneath me which can bestow on her
a moment's joy, or spare licr a jiKimurii'ft pang"
The brief words were the truth; to acreeti or to
gladden the life which he felt to hold in wanUhrp
from the Dead, he woiUdJpftfiven lii* own ; *
254 STBATHMORE.
this man's heart as there were " depths which sank
to lowest hell," so there were also * heights which
reached to highest heaven."' He spoke no more, but
stood silent, revolving many thoughts thoughts
which had but one centre and one goal : Lucille's
future peace.
As he went to his own chamber, half an hour after-
wards, he met her on the wide staircase ; she was
dressed for the evening, and about her hair was
wreathed a chain of delicate shells of a rare kind and
opal hue : they formed a graceful ornament, and he
noticed them as he paused.
"Oh, they are Nello's shells!" she answered,
laughing. " Are they mot pretty ? He brought them
from the cliffs to-day, and risked his life to get them.
He said so sadly tba/t he could not give me costly
pearls like yours,, that I told Babette to string them
on a Triehiiiopoly chain, and fasten back my hair
with thenau I knew he would be pleased."
The words struck him as they would not have done
but for others, he had lately heard. He looked down
into her fair eyes, mow glad and laraghing, yet in
whose depths a sadness ever lay, deep, yet unde-
finable :
" You love this boy, Lucille ?"
"Oh, dearly!"
She spoke warmly, earnestly r for the companion of
her childhood was,, indeed^ very dear to her; and of
"love," in men's and women's sense, Lucille knew
nothing, scarce its name, sarre as it was written to her
THE SHADOW OP THE FUTURE. 255
vague, mysterious, solemn, glorious in the pages
of Dante and his brother poets. Strathmore passed
his hand over her brow with a gentle caress, and went
onward in deep thought. It was strange how this
single holy feeling, which had grown out of his trust
from Erroll, penetrated and intertwined a life which
seemed, in all other respects, chill as ice, impenetrable
as steel, and filled to the brim with insatiate ambition,
worldly wisdom, and power which was not seldom as
unscrupulously sought as it was imperiously^ wielded.
It was singular how in the cold yet restless, successful
yet insatiate, callous yet embittered, career of the
Statesman, this solitary, pure, and chastened tender-
ness had been sown and rooted. Lucille was the sole
living thing he loved, Lucille the sole living thing he
would not have trampled down in his path unheeding;
and a sickly sense vi loss came over him as he thought
that, however he had thus far fulfilled her father's
trust, her future must pass into the care of others
whom it would be beyond his power to control ; that,
with whatever gratitude, reverence^ and love she
now regarded him, the time must come when her
guardian must surrender her to her husband, and the
joy of her Ef e be given from other hands, and other
Kps, than his.
u Caryll, I need a few words with you. Will you
come bit.Viflr | "
Strathmore stood outside one of the dining-room
windows smoking on the lawn without, while his
256 STEATHMOEE.
secretary and his nephew lingered over the olives.
Valdor was away on some legality connected with
Torlynne. The young man rose and went to him
instantly, where he stood in the moonlight; Strath-
more held him at a distance, and Caryll feared,
almost disliked him all youths of his age did.
The graceful negligence, the haughty courtesies,
more cold in their suavity than their omission could
ever have been, the subtle bitter sneer, the profound
knowledge, felt rather than ever shown all these
awed and repulsed them, apart from the lofty and
glittering fame which surrounded the successful and
inscrutable Minister.
"Walk away from the windows, if you please,"
said Strathmore, as he moved across the grass. At
the bottom of the lawn he turned and glanced at his
nephew. "So, Caryll, I hear you love my young
ward is it true f "
At the suddenness of the personal and merciless
question, spoken, moreover, in that soft, harmonious
voice of which every inflection could cut as coldly as
an ice wind, Nello was speechless ; he coloured to the
temples, and his eyes dropped shyly as a girl's ; his
love was sacred to him, and he dreaded his inquisitor.
In the light of the moon Strathmore's eyes studied
him searchingly, and the politician, accustomed to read
men's thoughts at a glance, read the youth's heart to
its depths. He smiled, unconsciously, contemptuously :
his nature was unsympathetic, and for the timidity and
poetry of young love he had no compassion he had
THE SHADOW OF THE FUTUKE. 257
never known them himself and here, as well as a
foolery, they looked a profanity.
" Chi arrossisse h su tacea, parla assai,"
he said, with the derisive coldness which was as terri-
ble as a knife-thrust to the ardent, sensitive, unveiled
heart of the boy, who shrank under the glance and
the tone, as a prisoner under the cold steel of the
inquisitor; " And may I ask on what grounds you
have upbuilt your romance, or what right you have
to presume to build it at all ? "
The hot blush died off young Caryll's face, leaving
it very pale : he had scarce known his love himself,
until these abrupt and merciless questions threw their
light upon it.
" Right ? " he said, hesitatingly and hurriedly. " I
have no right, sir scarcely hope."
" ' Scarcely ! ' Then you cherish some ? "
His eyes, with a chill disdain slumbering in their
depths, fastened in relentless watch upon his nephew's
face, till the painful flush and pallor kept changing
there like a woman's. It was a terrible ordeal to
Lionel Caryll to have his heart probed and bared by
this negligent, callous, pitiless, polished man of the
world !
"Who does not, sir, who loves?" he murmured,
almost indistinctly.
" Then you think that Lucille gives you hope ? "
The questions were put coldly, carelessly, but with
VOL. II. s
258 6TRATHM0RE.
an authority which seemed to the youth to wrench
answers from him whether he would or not.
"Yes no I cannot tell I dare not say," he
muttered, hurriedly. " She is very gentle to me,
but that she is to all things ; she loves me, I know,
but it may be only as a brother. Still still with
time, I fancy and she wore my shells in her hair to-
nigh t
His cold smile played a moment about Strathmore's
lips* To this man, whose soul had been drunk long
ago with the madness of passion, and was now steeped
in the intoxication of power, the shyness and the
romance of a first love seemed puling puerile senti~
ment.
"You consider you have hope," he said, chillily.
" Whether founded or unfounded, time will show.
And now, how much of this ' love* have you presumed
to whisper to my ward without my permission ? "
" Not a syllable ! " said the young man, eagerly.
The interrogation roused his pride, and made him
shake off the awe which he felt for the man who
stood there, smoking in the moonlight, with his
searching glance fixed on him, and his point-blank
questions dealing, without sympathy or compassion,
with what was to him the very core and goal of his
life. " Not a syllable, I swear, Sir ! I have never
let her dream of any other feeling than that with
which we played together in her infancy. I would
not I dare not she is too sacred in my eyes.
THE SHADOW OF THE FUTURE. 259
To speak of love to her would seem profanation ; to
think of it, does almost ! "
He spoke hurriedly but earnestly,. and with all the
delicacy and tenderness which characterised a love
that his own temperament, and Lucille's early years,
had both tended to make rather reverential than im-
petuous, rather poetic than passionate, such as the
young knights of Arthur's Code felt for some holy
and lofty love, their guiding-star from afar off, but
beyond the reach of grosser desire.
His answer found favour with Stratbmore, and
softened the haughty and scornful intolerance with
which he had hitherto regarded the young man's
attachment ; he perceived at a glance that here. there
would be no maudlin romance, no sickly sentiment
to brush the bloom off the fair opening leaves of
Lucille's young heart. He was silent, and paced up
and down for a few moments, musing on his ne-
phew's reply; then he paused, and looked on the
young frank face in the moonlight, while Oaryll's
eyes met his, fearlessly now, though a boyish flush
was hot on his temples.
" You are perfectly right," he said, briefly. " I am
glad you have so much perception and so much re-
ticence. To have taken advantage of your position
and opportunites to usurp her ear, without having
received my permission, I should have considered
very unwarrantable, and should have resented pro-
portionately. As it is, you consider that you have
82
260 STRATHMORE.
some grounds for hope, and I am aware myself that
Lucille holds you in sincere affection; whether it
may ever ripen to more, neither you nor I can tell,
and I distinctly forbid any attempt to force it pre-
maturely to do so."
Young Oaryll bent his head silently; he felt power-
less against this serene, inflexible will, and he knew
that Strathmore, as her guardian, had a right to speak
as he would.
" You understand? Now listen further. For two
years I forbid any attempt to speak of love to her, or
to secure her own. I do not interdict to you such
means as may warrantably foster her affection for
you ; to do so would be unjust, but you must neither
rouse nor fetter her heart in any way. At the end of
that time she will be old enough to make her own
choice, and she will have seen a wider world than this ;
you can then say to her what you will. If it prove
that the hope you now cherish is legitimate, and if
she find that you are dearer than any one has, or
could, become to her if, in a word, her happiness
depend on you I will sanction your suit. Give me
your word to keep the silence I exact ? "
Nello hesitated a moment. Two years ! It looked
an eternity! But an influence was upon him he
could not resist. He had feared Strathmore before,
now he felt his power; he saw, moreover, that the
words were gentle and were just, and he bowed his
head and gave the pledge.
Strathmore paused a brief time, looking at him
THE SHADOW OP THE FUTUBE. 261
keenly, and taking gauge of his character a gauge
which satisfied him that Lady Castlemere had been
right in her estimate of her grandson.
" Very well/' he continued. " Meanwhile, I will
assist your career, so that should you ultimately be
united to Lucille, your position may be honourable
for her. You leave Oriel in the spring ? My mother's
wealth is so tied that she can give you little or no-
thing, and you must make your own way in life. But
I will return you for a seat in the House, and I will
allow you such an income as will give you your inde-
pendence, and leave you unshackled. It will rest
with yourself then to become worthy of Lucille, and
such as I should trust with the care of her future."
Young Caryll looked at him, bewildered, incredu-
lous, distrusting his own senses. He had heard of
Strathmore , s ascetic indifference to wealth, and the
generosity with which he gave it to others, but for
himself he had had scarcely passing notice from him,
and he listened dreamily, marvelling whether his
dread had been error, and if beneath the chill and
satiric suavity of manner there lay compassion and
warmth. Words broke from him, full of the gratitude
he felt, eager, breathless, fervid, eloquent from their
simple truth and depth, and tremulous both with
surprise and emotion. To the sanguine and dauntless
heart of youth what luminous glory streamed over all
his future with Strathmore's words ! For youth knows
and fears nothing of two barriers in Life's path,
which men call Death and Failure.
250 STBJLTHMOBE.
and tie birds and the flowers; they are the only
things pare enough far her. Our brute passions have
nothing in common -with her."
^ Still unless she weae consigned, to conventual
seclusion it will be impossible to prevent the lore of
men from fastening on her by-and-by f "
" True : but it will be time enough to speak of that
whenever her own heart is touched."
There was the look in his eyes which ever came
there when his will was crossed; but Lady Castle-
mere's will was as resolute as his own. She pursued
the subject :
a But in the event I name, to one to whom Lucille
may be betrothed in the future, her parentage must
be made known. Has this never struck you ? "
" I see what you mean ; but it shall never be so."
The reply was calm, but it was inflexible. In his
heart he swore that none should ever learn that fatal
secret, none ever glean the power to unfold to her
that he whom she caressed and revered, and honoured
and prayed for as the guardian and giver of her every
joy, had been the destroyer of her father.
u But how can it be avoided? *
In his cold fathomless eyes she saw the evil look
glitter darker and darker, which would have been
restrained to none save herself, and he answered her
chillily :
" With that I will deal whenever the time comes,
Suffice it, I shall never permit any to learn a secret
THE SHADOW OP THE PUTUEE. 251
which is buried for ever, as much by his will as by
mine."
She mused a moment over his words :
"Then," she said, slowly, "then Lucille must
wed with Borne one who must love her too well to ask
her descent; there are few who love thus, Strath-
more."
He looked at her in impatience, in surprise, in
curiosity :
" Why talk of love at all ? To think of marriage
for her looks to me as premature, as it seems pollution!
In the seclusion in which you live here you select all
her acquaintance, and she meets none who can whisper
to her of what she does not herself dream,"
" Perhaps not ; but there is one here who may
do so."
" Yes ; my grandson loves her ; he scarce knows it
himself, they have been so long together, from her
infancy ; but I know it ; and some hour or other, un-
premeditated and involuntarily, he may discover his
own secret and utter it to her,"
" A boy's puling fancy ! a lad's moonstruck sick-
ness ! Why have him here if he must taint the air
Bhe breathes with the miserable maundering of senti-
ment?"
He spoke with intolerant, contemptuous impatience,
his slight, bitter smile upon his lips, chill and disdain-
ful; it incensed him more than he showed, that this
250 -STBJLTHMOBE.
and the birds and the flowers; they are the only
things pare enough far her. Our brute passions have
nothing in common "with her."
a Still unless she were consigned to conventual
seclusion it will be impossible to prevent the love of
men from fastening on her by-andrby f "
u True : but it will be time enough to speak of that
whenever her own heart is touched."
There was the look in his eyes which ever came
there when his will was crossed; but Lady Castle-
mere's will was as resolute as his own. She pursued
the subject :
u But in the event I name, to one to whom Lucille
may be betrothed in the futare, her parentage must
be made known. Has this never struck you ? "
" I see what you mean ; but it shall never be so."
The reply was calm, but it was inflexible. In his
heart he swore that noe should ever leam that fatal
Becret, none ever glean the power to unfold to her
that he whom she caressed and revered, and honoured
and prayed for as the guardian and giver of her every
joy, had been the destroyer of her father.
u But how can it be avoided? "
In his cold fathomless eyes she saw the evil look
glitter darker and darker, which would have been
restrained to none save herself, and he answered her
chillily :
" With that I will deal whenever the time comes,
Suffice it, I shall never permit any to learn a secret
THE SHADOW OP THE FUTURE. 251
which is buried for ever, as much by his will as by
mme.
She mused a moment over his words :
"Then," she said, slowly, "then Lucille most
wed with some one who must love her too well to ask
her descent; there are few who love thus, Strath-
more."
He looked at her in impatience, in surprise, in
curiosity :
" Why talk of love at all ? To think of marriage
for her looks to me as premature, as it seems pollution!
In the seclusion in which you live here you select all
her acquaintance, and she meets none who can whisper
to her of what she does not herself dream."
" Perhaps not ; but there is one here who may
do so."
"Here?"
" Yes ; my grandson loves her : he scarce knows it
himself, they have been so long together, from her
infancy ; but I know it ; and some hour or other, un-
premeditated and involuntarily, he may discover his
own secret and utter it to her,"
" A boy's puling fancy ! a lad's moonstruck sick-
ness ! Why have him here if he must taint the air
she breathes with the miserable maundering of senti-
ment?"
He spoke with intolerant, contemptuous impatience,
his slight, bitter smile upon his lips, chill and disdain-
ful; it incensed him more than he showed, that this
250 STBJLTBMOEE.
and die birds and the flowers; they are the only
things pare enough far her. Our brute passions have
nothing in common with Jber."
u Still unless she were consigned to conventual
seclusion it will be impossible to prevent the love of
men from fastening on her by-and-by f "
" True : but it will be time enough to speak of that
whenever her own heart is touched."
There was the look in his eyes which ever came
there when his will was crossed; but Lady Castle-
mere's will was as resolute as his own. She pursued
the subject :
u But in the event I name, to one to whom Lucille
may be betrothed in the future, her parentage must
be made known. Has this never struck you ?"
" I see what you mean ; but it shall never be so."
The reply was calm, but it was inflexible. In his
heart he swore that none should ever learn that fated
secret, none ever glean the power to unfold to her
that he whom she caressed and revered, and honoured
and prayed for as the guardian and giver of her every
joy, had been the destroyer of her father.
u But how can it be avoided ? *
In his cold fathomless eyes she saw the evil look
glitter daiiker and darker, which would have been
restrained to none save herself, and he answered her
chillily :
" With that I will deal whenever the time comes,
Suffice it, I shall never permit any to learn a secret
THE SHADOW OP THE FUTURE. 251
which is buried for ever, as much by his will as by
mine."
She mused a moment over his words :
"Then," she said, slowly, "then Lucille must
wed with some one who must love her too well to ask
her descent; there are few who love thus, Strath-
more."
He looked at her in impatience, in surprise, in
curiosity :
" Why talk of love at all ? To think of marriage
for her looks to me as premature, as it seems pollution!
In the seclusion in which you live here you select all
her acquaintance, and she meets none who can whisper
to her of what she does not herself dreamt'
" Perhaps not ; but there is one here who may
do so."
"Here?"
" Yes ; my grandson loves her ; he scarce knows it
himself, they have been so long together, from her
infancy ; but I know it ; and some hour or other, un-
premeditated and involuntarily, he may discover his
own secret and utter it to her."
" A boy's puling fancy I a lad's moonstruck sick-
ness ! Why have him here if he must taint the air
she breathes with the miserable maundering of senti-
ment?"
He spoke with intolerant, contemptuous impatience,
his slight, bitter smile upon his lips, chill and disdain-
ful; it incensed him more than he showed, that this
268 STRATHMOBE.
dark and mournful beauty, and her voice was hushed
in its earnestness.
" I was thinking of how great you are, and how
good ; and how you who sway men with your word,
and empires with your will, yet have so much care,
and thought, and love for me."
" Good ! " He echoed the word with the bitterness
of anguish ; he had trained himself to bear all these
things from her lips, and had sedulously fostered the
reverence and gratitude she felt for him, but none
the less did they cut him to the soul ; and now and
theh, even his will of steel and his long-worn visor
could not conceal the spasm of a struck wound, of a
wakened conscience. His voice had a thrill of
mingled pain and tenderness in it now as he stooped
towards her :
" Never give that word to anything which I do,
Lucille, least of all to what I do for you. You know
that you are dear to me for your father's sake."
" I know ; but I cannot love you less, but more,
because you loved him so well," she said, softly, while
her hand nestled into his, and drew it caressingly
closer to her. At the clinging touch and the gentle
words, the brand of crime, seared on the soul of the
murderer quivered, as the brand of fire quivers in the
living flesh of the doomed.
Yet he sat there, calm still, letting his hand lie in
hers, and his lips wear the words with which he ever
spoke of the dead; for his strength was great to
endure.
THE SHADOW OF THE FUTUEE. 269
" True, I loved him well," he said, gently ; " and
so would you have done ; Lucille, you do not f prget
him ; you think of him fondly, sometimes, as though
you had known him as though he were living
now?"
" Ah, yes," she murmured, softly. " I think of
you both, think of you together ; you have told me
of him until I know him so well, and when I kneel
down I often pray to God to let me see his face, and
hear his voice, in my dreams, as well as yours. And
He does."
Strathmore sat silent ; his hand lying in hers, his
heart smitten by those innocent and childlike words,
as by the stroke of the avenging angeL
" Your dreams are more merciful to you than the
life which robbed you of him," he said, calmly and
gently, for he suffered without allowing one sign to
escape, or one blow to be spared him. " Love your
father's name better than mine, Lucille. He is more
worthy it than I."
" Lucille could not love anything better than you,"
she said, musingly, while her earnest, wistful eyes
fondly studied his face with that regard which he had
noticed as too mournful and too deeply contempla-
tive for her years, when, as a little child, she had
asked why he suffered, on the sea-shore. " Where
was it that he died, Lord Cecil, and how ? You have
never told me that."
" He died abroad."
" And were you with him ?"
270 STBATHMOBE.
" Yes."
"Did he suffer !"
A slight quiver shook his voice :
" I hope to God, no."
" He died happily, then ?"
" He died at peace with all, even with those who
injured him. Not happy, since since he left your
mother scarce older than you are now."
Lucille sighed, a hushed, broken sigh.
" No and his death was hers. I think /should
die of a great grief, as my tame curlew did when his
sister-bird was killed by the eagle. He could not
live ; why should he ? There was no joy in the air,
or the sea, or the sky, when what he loved was
taken."
She was silent, her hand clinging caressingly to
Strathmore's, as her eyes grew wistful with thoughts
too poetic and too deep for her years. He rose, in-
voluntarily :
" Hush, Lucille ! No grief shall ever touch you !
Why think of what cannot, what shall not, come
nigh you? Are those letters? Is the evening mail
come?"
"Oh yes; those are yours. But come and sit by
me to read them. Do ! "
He obeyed her : inflexible as bronze to any other,
a wish of Lucille was sacred to him. As her guardian,
he had commanded that her desire should never be
disputed nor disappointed, and to himself, when with
her, he allowed it to be law. A nature less pure, less
THE SHADOW OP THE FUTUEE. 271
loving, less incapable of being warped to egotism or
tyranny than hers, might have been rained by this
limitless indulgence; with Lucille it had.no effect,
save that of rendering her affections more clinging
and deeply rooted,and her character more tender and
dependent; the very luxuriance of its beauty was
fostered by the warmth it basked in, if it were mora
certain to be blighted at the first sweep of frost- or
storm. She lay still watching him, while he sat beside
her breaking the seals of his correspondence. His
face wore no evil traits to her ; she only saw its- power;
its intellect, its profound melancholy ; she only saw
that the eyes so cold, the lips so mocking to others,
for her ever wore gentle smiles and generous words.
" Je n'en puis rien faire ces traits ont toutes 1b&
plus grandes qualij^s et tous les plus grands- vices,"
a French sculptor had once said, casting down his
calliope and chisel before a bust of Strathmore. But
Lucille only saw the nobler, and saw none of* the
darker meaning, and she lay looking at him lovingly,
reverently, silently : she was never more truly happy
than thus. And as he sat thus, beside her couch,.
Valdor, who had that moment returned and entered
the drawing-room, looked at them unperceived, and
wondered afresh, as he had done before, what secret
this could be which united Strathmore to this young
girl, and which made a man ordinarily negligent in
manner, indifferent to all human affections, and solely
devoted to ambition and power, be tender towards
her as a woman, submit to all her gentle caprices,
272 STRATHMORE.
f orestal her lightest wish, and watch with pleasure for
her slightest smile. It was a mystery which he could
not fathom. Strathmore, glancing upward, read his
thoughts. Valdor looked keenly at him, to note if he
resented having thus been seen; he might as well
have sought to note the marble features of the Parian
bust near him move and speak !
Strathmore was never betrayed into an unspoken
expression of what he felt ; he was calmly and im-
passively impenetrable. He did not move now, but
smiled a courteous welcome to his friend, and spoke
of some political news which the day mail had
brought.
But he remembered the look with which the frank
Henri Cinquiste had gazed at himself and Lucille,
and the words he had spoken thp night before, of
surprise at her having never visited White Ladies;
and he acted on both.
" Lucille, White Ladies will be full next month,"
he said, with a slight smile, the next morning, looking
up from his letters where they sat at breakfast, the
sunlight flickering through the screen of foliage and*
roses which overhung the Elizabethan windows.
She looked up eagerly, a flush on her cheeks, and
her lips parted.
" Would you like to be with us ?"
He spoke still with a slight smile, as of a man
listlessly amused with the bright caprices and easily-
bestowed pleasures of a child.
"Oh, Lord Cecil! "
THE SHADOW OP THE FUTURE. 273
She did not say more ; Valdor and his own secre-
tary were strangers to her, and indulgence had never
made her exacting.
" Very well, then. Plead with my mother, if she
have no objection, to do me the honour to come there,
and bring you with her."
" What a fool I was to suppose he did not wish her
to visit White Ladies ! My brain must be going, to
dream such nonsense. That lovely child bewitches
me!" thought Valdor, as he listened.
Two days afterwards, Strathmore left for the Con-
tinent. These brief visits were all he, a Foreign
Minister, spared to Silver-rest ; he was seldom fatigued
never alone ; he was absorbed in the keen contest
for power, and lived, with scarce a week's retirement,
in the fulness of the world.
Valdor remained ; all that he needed to see or do
at Torlynne could have been seen and done in a
week's time, but he stretched it over almost to the
time at which Strathmore would be at White Ladies,
and he should go thither with the rest of the autumn
guests. The French noble had no pastoral tastes;
" Hor8 de Paris, hors du monde" was most essentially
his creed ; the sounding of the seaS and the soft wild
^beauty of the western coast had no music and no
charm for him ; a viveur, a state-conspirator, a man
of fashion, he was customarily wearied and impatient
at a day's detention in any other world than his own.
Yet he stayed on, in, or near the solitudes of Silver^
rest.
VOL. II. t
74 STBATHMORE.
He was captivated by the child-beauty, the spiritual,
unconscious loveliness, which he had first seen among
the lilies of the valley, flowers whose grace and fra-
gitity were like her own. He was at once enchained
and held in check by it ; to Lucille he could not
speak of love, or even of compliment, as he would
have done to others, they seemed profanation ; yet he
began to feel for her a far holier and more enduring
tenderness than he, a wit and a voluptuary, had before
known. She was silent with him ; except with those
whom she knew well, she had something of the soft
shyness of the half -tamed fawn, and her nature was
one of those, poetic, introspective, deeply thoughtful,
and meditative far beyond their years, which speak
but to few, and only find utterance when moved by
the voice that they respond to, as the JEolian chords
only echo to the touch of certain winds. But it was
this which was newest to him ; it gave him much to
conquer, and he saw that whoever would win her
heart must never startle it rudely from its innocent
rest, but wind his way gently and slowly. He felt as
both Strathmore, a cold and negligent Statesman, and
Caryll, a romantic and unworn youth, had equally
done, that " love " was no word to whisper to Lucille,
and that, grasped too quickly or too boldly, the sensi-*
tive plant would surely close and recoil.
But Valdor had never failed, and his nature was
sanguine; therefore he stayed on near Silver-rest,
and learned a purer passion than he had ever known,
while he listened to the young girl's voice, that was
THE SHADOW OP THE FUTURE. 275
low and sweet as the lulling of the seas ; or watched
her, himself unseen, where she sat gazing on the
changing face of the waters, with the deep shadow of
ivy-hung rocks above, and sunlit sands stretching
before her; or heard her songs rising in mellow
evening air, with some sad, wild German legend or
rich cathedral chant for their burden ; or won her to
speak to him of the things in which her eyes and her
heart those at once of a poet and a child, an artist
and a dreamer found beauty and delight : the silvery
flash of a seagull's wing, a bird resting on a heather
spray, a crested wave leaping in the lighi^ a trailing
coil of forestr-leaves.
Strathmore had made provision for the early, guile-
less, hesitating love of the boy Nello ; he had made
none could have made none against the more
subtle, more eloquent, and more tutored tenderness
of the man who had been beside him when he had
slain her father, while in the west the sun had set, in
the dead years long gone.
t2
276
CHAPTER XXIL
" SEIZED, IN THE NAME OF THE EMPEKOK."
It was past midnight, in the salon au deuarifane, in
the Rue Beaujon.
The lights were many, and in their dazzle the warm
nuances, the rose-tendre hues, the ormolu, the mirrors,
the smoking-couches, made an enticing fourberia delta
scena in its own florid, demi-monde style. The air
was heavy with the odours of wine from the supper-
room, whose folding-doors stood open, and with the
perfume of that chillum which was a speciality of the
Rue Beaujon, and which some who smoked it averred
to be delirious as Monte Christo's hatchis. Two or
three tables stood about the room, and round each
were grouped some half-dozen men, young attaches,
soldiers, bankers, Englishmen, or nouveaux riches,
few if any of them over thirty, some wanting ten
years of it, and all flush of money, or they would have
found no entrance there. At one table they were play-
" SEIZED, IN THE NAME OF THE EMPEROR." 277
ing Trente-ek-Un, at the other Trente-et-Quarante,
at a higher maximum than is permitted at Baden,
gros jeuy where the colours revolved and the gold
heaps changed, swift as thought in a dizzy whirl, and
swifter than the thought of many could follow them.
For the gaming which is forbade publicly will, like
every other dangerous instinct, be indulged in secresy ;
and the play in the Kue Beaujon was greedily sought
after suppers that left the pulse heated 'with fiery
wines, and the reason little able to baffle the intrica-
cies of hazard. It had made many a career beg-
gared and ruined, ending in the Faubourg d'Enf er
with crossing-sweepers rags, where it had begun in
the Boulevard des Capucines with a thousand-franc
breakfast ; and it caused not a few lives to cease by a
pistol-shot in the Bois de Vincennes, or an overdose of
morphine in the grey early dawn.
The play was at its highest, the stakes enormous,
the gold on the tables flashed and glittered under the
light which was thrown back from the rose hangings
and the gilded walls ; the heavy odours of the wines
filled the air with an intoxicating aroma, and the
wreaths of smoke still curled in spirituous vapour,
though the hookahs had been left, while now and then
the hazard went on in a dead silence, only broken by
the formula of the cards ; and of tener was played in
a mad whirl, a reckless rotation, in the noise of wild
jests and riotous laughter and unbridled licence of
words from brains half drunk.
And she who was the evil Circe of this evil Avernus,
278 STRATHMOEE.
with a glance would turn attention from the cards,
till too late the stake was lost; or with a smile
would daze and dazzle some novice till his gold poured
in showers into the bank; or with some gay mot,
which still rang with something of the old moqueur,
bewitching wit, would raise a laugh at the right mo-
ment, till her confederate who played croupier for
the nonce raked in by rouleaux the money of
the tyro. "Men who tempt, and ^women who are
tempted!" So runs the old hackneyed, maudlin,
threadbare dictum, much akin to the time-worn
opticism which runs, " the Pagans who persecuted,
and the Christians who were martyred ; " as if there
were not six of the one and six of the other ! Pshaw !
leave formularies aside, good world, and open your
eyes. Women, from Eve downwards, have been
First Tempters, and. the tempters among them make
up half the ranks of their sex, subtle wooers and
destroyers of their hundreds.
In the light, with the bloom of arf upon her face
and the lustre of art lent- to her eyes,, with mock
diamonds glittering where"once the costly sapphires
of a peeress had lain, with the enamel covering the
deep haggard lines, and a smile haunting the lips
with the mocking shadow of its old resistless witchery,
there was some loveliness still : though ghastly with-
out its youth ; though wrecked most piteously to
those who had known her in the years of her glory ;
though fearful in the story which it told to those
who paused to read it. There was loveliness still,
" SEIZED, IN THE NAME OP THE EMPEROR." 279
though a wretched travesty of that which once had
been ; though justly and truly looking on it she had
cried out in her bitterness, " O, my lost beauty ! my
lost beauty!" since none who remembered what
Marion Vavasour once had been, and despised the
wreck, remembered and despised as utterly as she.
For this woman, whofwas without remorse for her
work or conscience for her crimes, had a ceaseless
misery for the social degradation which denied her
Pride, and for the encroaching years which left her
without Power, since these had been her gods, omni-
potent and beloved, and were now drifted from her
reach for ever, never again to be recovered.
The Mistress of Paris, who had beheld Greece rise
in arms at the havoc of her loveliness, flung to the
ribald, brutal crowds of the common soldiery, would
not more bitterly have felt her degradation than did
this woman. For, though sensual, merciless, frail,
and fatal as She who, in the verse of -3Eschylus,
comes with Death and Havoc following on her love-
liness, she had loved to reign with imperious will, she
had loved to veil her infidelities in poetic grace, she
had loved to have her foot on the bent neck of a
prostrate world; and now now she sickened at
herself ; not for her guilt, but for her humiliation ;
not for the deep stain upon her soul, but for her
broken sceptre, her jeered crown, her rent and trampled
purples.
Is it not this, and no better than this, which now
and again passes for Remorse ? yet which is no more
280 STBATHMOBE.
Remorse than its twin-brother, trembling Fear, is
true Repentance.
, Remorse Marion Vavasour never knew, and never
could know ; but anguish for her own lost omnipo-
tence she did. She knew it now; to-night, while
the noisy laughs echoed about her, and the reeking
fumes filled the air of her salon. Oh I bitterness of
bitterness! she, into whose presence sovereigns had
humbly sued to come, could not resent the coarsest"
word that was uttered in her presence ; she, at whose
feet princes had vainly knelt, while statesmen paled
before the beauty of her smile, must tempt, and court,
and seek these unfledged youths, these nameless
idlers ; their witless profanities fouled the ear which
had once listened to the graceful wit and delicate
flattery of monads, their slighting glance con-
temptuously leered upon the face whose beauty once
had been the theme of courts, the hymned of prince
and poet, the torch which lit whatever it passed, to
love, and feud, and madness. She who had .ruled
the rulers of the earth, could now be slighted by the
lowliest! deadlier than sackcloth and ashes, than
hempen cord and sheet of penitence, were the rouge
upon her cheek, the laughter upon her lips, the
mock gem upon her breast, to this woman whose fas-
tidious pride, whose victorious sway, whose aristocratic
grace, whose capricious imperious will had been as
haughty and dear to her as those of any anointed
queen.
It was long past midnight ; the play was fast and
" SEIZED, IN THE NAME OF THE EMPEROR." 281
furious ; the stakes of frightful enormity ; the
gamesters now and then drank down fiery draughts
of fierce Roussillon, or above-proof cognac, or poison-
ous absinthe, and went, madder than before, to the
wild whirl; the light flashed back from the rose
hangings and gilded ornaments on to the faces of the
cards and the heaps of, gold; and now the game went
on in a riotous chorus of jest and laughter, and now
in the dead silence of high-strung excitement, while
here and there fell a muttered oath, or twitching lips
turned pale, as a million of francs was swept away on
the turn of a colour or the hazard of a card.
Suddenly on the panels of the door, came a loud
summons as at the gates of a barricade, thundering,
impatient: many of the gamblers, their brains be-
sotted and their reason whirling with the delirium of
play, scarce heard and did not note it, but he who
played as croupier grew pale, and with a rapid sign
began to sweep away the piles of Naps, while the
Priestess of the Pandemonium, who ere this had
slaughtered human lives with her skilled lie, and sent
a murderer out to work her vengeance with cruel,
unfaltering falsehood, stood in the gaslight with the
unreal smile arrested upon vher lips, and her cheek
quivering slightly under its rouge.
She knew that the Kouge-et-Noir of the Rue
Beaujon was discovered beyond concealment at last.
" Au nom de la Loi I "
Sharp and swift upon the summons for admittance,
the door 'was burst open by instruments which
282 STRATHMORE.
wrenched and splintered all the intricate locks and
bolts for those little scrupulous of ceremony or tole-
rant of delay; the gaudy rose portifere was thrust
aside by rough hands, which dashed down all the
barricades erected behind it; the salon and its privacy
were invaded, the police filled the chambers.
" De la part de VEmpereur ! " said a voice, serene,
inflexible, as bland as though it gave a welcome salu-
tation, as frigid as though it pronounced a sentence
of death. Confusion, riot, tumult, execration arose
pele-mele;. the stakes were seized, the doors were
closed so that no egress was possible ; the tables were
overturned, the croupiers dashed wildly here and
there, trying to get to covert like a fox run close by
the pack ; some of the gamblers, their brains dizzy
with the chillum and the wine, stared stupidly and
helplessly at the seizure; others, cursing and blas-
pheming, sprang at the gold and cards, swore they
were but playing at Boc with three francs as their
maximum, and offered bribes, at any rates, with insane
eagerness to have the thing kept dark; And while
his subordinates secured the croupiers and the stakes,,
and other officials quietly took down the names and
addresses of all present, the Inspecteur approached, die
mistress of the salon, and, with the same tranquil and
inflexible courtesy, arrested her in the name of the
Emperor.
For the moment, losing her self-possession, her
presence of mind, her swift invention, and her ready
diplomacy, the hideous contrast of her present and
" SEIZED, IN THE NAME OF, THE EMPEROR." 283
her past smote on her through the darkness of evil
years and the callousness of a soul unsexed ; she
writhed from under the official's touch as from be-
neath that of an adder, and gazed at him with the
wild stare of a hunted animal hard pressed, and,
wringing her white and delicate hands, laughed a
shrill, terrible, mocking laugh :
u The Emperor the Emperor ! i In the name of
the Emperor!' What! are the years come back
when I was his guest and he mine! Does he rer
member how often he sat at my table, that he sum-
mons me now to his Court ? To the Tuileries ! To
the Tuileries ! Of course ! these diamonds are fit for
the Tuileries!"
Bending the false jewels from her bosom and her
hair, she cast them on the floor and trod upon them
with her foot, those miserable symbols and insignia of
her fall, crushing them to powdered glass) and laugh-
ing all the while, with hitter delirious mockery of
herself.
In that brief instant of passionate misery, of
ghastly irony, something of her old resistless grace,
of her old imperious pride, returned as she wrested
herself back from the official's grasp ? and stamped
into shining dust the worthless gems, while above the
uproar round the gaming-table, above the clash of
the gold as the police swept the stakes away, above
the oaths of the startled, halfi-drunk gamesters, rang
that laugh, once silvery as music, now jarred and
dissonant :
284 STBATHMOBE.
" To the Tuileries ! Of course ! To the Tuileries !
My diamonds are fit for a Court ! "
The Inspecteur, smiling slightly, took no note or
heed of this delirious despair, and seemed neither to
have seen nor heard it, but, proceeding without pause
or hesistance with his errand, arrested her. For
what she said had not even a meaning to him; he
had heard of her but under her last alias and nom de
guerre; he knew her but as a prisoner who had trans-
gressed the law, and Marion Vavasour had no power
now not even to make the world, which is swift to
forget, remember her past.
And this is the last step into the abyss of oblivion,
when none even pause to recal what we were.
As a voiture dormise bore her, in close escort, from
the doors of the house in the Kue Beaujon, appre-
hended on the proven charge of having a private
gambling-hell every night in her salon, the vehicle was
stopped in its progress a little farther down the street
by carriages which blocked the way. The blind of
the window nearest her was but half drawn, and she,
who had now recovered her composure, her finesse,
and her dissimulation, leaned forward as though to
show how little moved she was by the charge against
her by watching the night with idle amusement.
The carriages which entangled the dormise stood
before the residence of a French Prince, not enclosed
by a court-yard, the doors standing wide open, as the
guests dispersed after a State entertainment of more
"seized, in the name of the empebob." 285
than ordinary magnificence. Descending the broad
flight of steps, which was lined on either side by
lacqueys, and lighted to the brightness of noon, came
the English Minister for whom the equipage waited,
the gas shining on the riband which crossed his
breast and the orders and stars which glittered there,
and falling on his face a face of pride, of domi.
nance, of successful and imperious power.
Marion Vavasour, looking on him thus, shivered
with the thirst of an impotent vengeance, and drooped
her head upon her hands with a bitter moan of chained
and baffled hatred.
He lived in riches, in dignity, in honour, with his
name on the lips of the world, and the cup of his
ambition filled to the brim and crowned; while
she!
" Oh, Heaven ! " she whispered, passionately,
through her clenched teeth, " will the hour never
come when I can strike him in his power and his
arrogance! Will the day iiever dawn when I shall
say back in his ear, i Such mercy as you gave, I give
to you!'"
And in the warm summer night in the Paris street
they passed each other thus as the carriages rolled
on : the Minister who went from a State-gathering,
and the Arrested who was taken to Judgment.
286
CHAPTER XXm.
" ROSES MY SECRET KEEP."
White Ladies was filled.
In the great court-yard, troops of saddle-horses, or
carriages with their postilions and outriders splashed
and tired, came home in the grey twilight while the
dressing-bell rang ; in the King's Hall covers were laid
for half a hundred guests ; in the preserves a thousand
head of game were bagged each day, yet no ground
beaten twice ; in the stately galleries trailed the sweep-
ing dresses of peeresses ; and under the roof of the
Abbey were gathered not a few of those whose play-
things are the policies and destinies of nations. For
the master of White Ladies was in Office; and,
while the dictum of the world never swerved him
from his own course, he was a man who knew, to the
utmost of its value, the worth of being prominent in
the sight of the world if you seek to lead it.
Eome went to Cincinnatus in his farmstead soli-
" ROSES MY SEOBET KEEP." ' 287
tude ; but modern Europe would never seek a Sulla
once retired to his Guman villa. Strathmore knew
this ; none better ; and while he smiled at the follies
of mankind, turned them to his own profit, and sur-
rounded himself with luxury and circumstance be-
cause he recognised in them the most intelligible
symbols of rule and power to the purblind sight of
the masses, though he held both in disdain, and in
his own tastes was almost ascetic, in his own life
almost austere.
The gatherings at White Ladies were noted through
the country ; and Strathmore was as courtly a host as
in his earlier years : his genius was one of those which,
essentially facile, are never laborious. The amount of
work done by him was vast, but it was done without
effort ; though he never wholly laid aside the political
harness, none saw a gleam of it through the silken
surcoat he wore in society ; and whilst the chief secret
of his power over men lay in the entire absence of
sensitive self-consciousness, or Utopian ideology from
his career, not a little attraction lay for them in the
brilliant ease with which ,tnis ambitious and arduous
career was covered by the same art with which the
Damascus armourers covered their keenest steel with
the light elegance of the charing ; while the chasing
blinded the eyes before which it flashed, the cun-
ning smiths knew that the steel cut swifter passage
home.
The warm sun fell across the sward through the
boughs of the wych-elms, and down the ruined
288 STBATHMOEE.
cloisters into the oriel room where he sat at break-
fast. The purple hangings were behind him, with
the dead gold of their broidered chiffre; the light
fell through the painted panes and the blazoned
motto, " &lag t antf Spate not ;" without, the same
lengthened shadows fell across the sward, and the
same ivy roots clung about the cloisters ; even his
own features were unaltered, the same save for some
trace of added age, some look of haughtier power
and of deeper melancholy, as on the day when he
whom he had loved and slain had sat at his table,
and the name of their temptress and destroyer been
first upon his lips. Yet of that day he did not even
think once out of the thousand times that found him
sitting thus : wear the spiked band of penance long
about your loins, and they shall so learn to bear it,
that they feel it seldom, save when a sudden blow
drives the iron afresh into the flesh. Could the
Furies have pursued Orestes through many years, he
would have grown used to the haunting troop, and
would have learned to sleep, to rest, to labour, and to
love in the loathed presence of the Avengers; and
only at rare intervals would he have started from his
slumber to shudder at the accursed forms, or flee in
the dead of night from the sacred temple, because
they hunted him from rest, and pursued him for the
blood of Clytemnestra.
Strathmore's life was a successful one ; not a con-
tented one, because his insatiate and restless ambition
always desired wider and more irresponsible domi-
"ROSES MY SECRET KEEP.' 289
nance than in this country the highest can ever
wield, and because all happiness had been stricken
from it with the betrayal of the woman he had wor-
shipped, of the lips for whose kiss he had stained his
soul with guilt. But one of those lives which, full,
grand, eminent, make " happiness" look tame, insipid,
and needless : and in such a life it was but the solitary
hours when silence and sleep were nigh, or the rare
days when the eyes of Lucille met his own, which
remorse could claim ; for the rest Strathmore was the
world's, and the world his.
There was a brilliant party gathered about him
at breakfast: English statesmen, German princes,
French nobility, with lovely women, who sometimes
discussed the question over their Oi'ange Pekoe before
the dressing-bell rang, whether he would ever marry.
Negligent of their charms, and wedded to public life,
brilliant eyes softly wooed him, never to awake re-
sponse: the burning passion which had once con-
sumed his life seemed to have seared out every trace
of warmer desires. After that mad, guilty, but de-
voted love, none could assail him ; the sternest ascetic
who had ever dwelt in that Dominican monastery was
not colder to women than he who, beneath its roof,
had been the lover of Marion Vavasour.
With a large party he went out that morning deer-
stalking for the day in the forests which belted in White
Ladies, where red pleer were as abundant as in the
wilds of Exmoor. The sun had sunk, and the windows
of the grey and stately facade were all lit, as they
VOL. II. u
290 STRATHMOBE.
returned and dispersed to their several chambers;
while Strathmore went to his own room, fronting
the State Apartments, which had been unused from
the time when they had harboured the loveliness
which had tempted and forsaken him. Of her he
now thought, as he left his chamber and returned
along the corridor ; one of the long line of windows
stood open to the night, and from the gardens below
was up-wafted the heavy, rich scent of the roses ; and
the remembered perfume suddenly rising, made the
memory which lay within, coiled to stillness, but
never dead,
like a dreaming snake,
Drowsily lift itself fold by fold,
And gnaw and gnaw hungrily, half awake.
It had been the love of his manhood, that single
burning passion of an ambitious life; and though
changed in one swift hour to deadliest hate, which
had pursued her with unquenched and insatiate ven-
geance, which would have watched her still, with
unrelenting gaze, starve as a beggar at his feet, and
die of a beggar/s dole denied when memory uprose,
and with it burned again upon his own the lips which
had betrayed him, and with it he beheld again the
loveliness for which he had rent down and trampled
under foot the laws of God and man, the old agony
uncoiled from its rest, and pierced him with its
poisoned fangs*
He had loved her, till ambition, honour, conscience,
life itself, had all been given to her hands ; he had
" ROSES MY SECEET KEEP." 291
loved her with delirious, ungrudging worship, that
saw in her kiss his heaven, in her smile his world, in
her will his deity ; and that dead passion awoke, not
less in hate but more, while yet across the stretch
of many years it was stricken afresh with the stroke of
its betrayal, and sickened afresh over all its wealth
wasted, its treasure mocked, its idolatrous love poured
out in vain ! in vain ! upon that lovely, hideous,,
beautiful wanton thing, upon a courtezan, and an as-
sassinatress. And it was thus it awoke now, stirred
to memory by the odour of the roses that stole up-
wards on the mist through the opened window,
as he passed down the solitary corridor; and he
flung the casement to, with swift hand and passionate
gesture, to shut out that haunting, mocking fra-
grance of the flowers that Marion Vavasour had
loved.
He the cold, inflexible, and successful Statesman
shuddered and shrank from the mere scent of the
summer-roses I
A low, ringing laugh, echoing gaily on the air,
startled the silence of the corridor : it came from the
unused State Chambers. He started as he stood by
the casement, and looked up. The long passage lead-
ing thither was dully lit, for the gas burned low, and
at its foot the opposite door of the State rooms stood
open, and with a light held high above her head, so
that while the arched doorway and the chamber be-
hind were deep in gloom, its luminance fell upon her
and about her, brightly shed upon her young and
u2
294 6TRATHM0BE.
solemn, time-worn grandeur. Take me all over it
now, will you now ? "
The earnestness, too deep and thoughtful for her
years, with which she had spoken of her trust and
love for her guardian had passed away ; now she was
only a child, used to the gratification of every bright
caprice and momentary fancy as she looked up at him
with longing in her eyes and eagerness upon her lips.
He smiled :
" Not now, Lucille ; we dine at nine, and it wants
only a quarter ; to-morrow I will take you wherever
you wish. But how do you come here and alone?
The rooms where you were are never used. They
have not given you those chambers, surely ? "
He spoke with impatient anxiety: he could not
have had her rest there !
She laughed amusedly :
" I lost my way ! When I was dressed, I sent
Babette to ask Lady Castlemere some question for
me, but she was so long gone that I grew tired, and
thought I would go myself. But I could not find the
room so well as I fancied ; I missed it among all
these passages, and found myself wandering in those
chambers. Why are they never used? "
Strathmore avoided answer.
" You must not wander alone about White Ladies
till you know its intricacies, my dear. You may very
easily lose yourself. I will take you to my mother
now they ought to have placed you close to her
" ROSES MY SECBET KEEP." 295
and then we must go down to the drawing-rooms.
There are plenty of people very desirous to see you."
Lucille sighed a little :
"Ah! I do not care much for strangers," she
answered him, as she ran up the steps, where she had
hastily set down her little silver lamp.
The spaniel which he had given her in her infancy,
and with which she never parted, though it was now
very old, had remained in the chamber, and she went
back to fetch him. The dog did not come imme-
diately to her call, and Strathmore, following her,
stood once more in the State Apartments, where his
step had never entered, and his eyes never rested,
through the many years which had passed since he
had first returned to White Ladies.
"What beautiful rooms! Why are they never
used? Because they are only for the Koyal Family,
is it ? Who slept here last, then ? "
She spoke, holding the lamp high above her head,
so that its light was shed on her, and flickered fit-
fully on the azure hangings, the Venetian mirrors,
the gold services, the silk, and lace, and velvet, the
costly cabinets near, and the dark shadow afar off,
where the silvery rays could not reach, but left half
the magnificence of the room lost in the darkness of
the night.
At her innocent question he shuddered as at the
scent of the summer-roses ! His eyes glanced for one
moment over the luxurious chamber, with its costly
296 STRATHMORE.
adornments and its depths of gloom, in sickening
memory then they fell upon , the form of Lucille,
where she stood in the halo of the light, one hand
holding to her heart the little dog which had once
kept its faithful vigil crouched in the bosom of the
dead. The hideous past seemed to breathe through
the chamber with its pestilential odour, its avenged
passions, its eternal guilt and he stretched his hand,
and drew her with a sudden gesture out from that
unholy place.
Yet his voice was tranquil and his smile calm as he
closed the door on her, and led her forward :
"Those State rooms are damp, they have been
unused so long ; it is not wise for you to be in them
at night, Lucille. Besides, every one will think that
I have deserted my guests."
And, with the suave and graceful dignity of a
courtier, he conducted her along the silent corridor,
and down the broad oak staircase, in the full gleam
of light, giving her urbane and courtly welcome
beneath the roof of White Ladies, where her fathers
laugh had so often rung in clear and joyous music,
and her father's hand closed in love and friendship on
the hand Which now held hers the hand which, un-
faltering, had dealt him death.
Lucille, introduced into the splendid circle gathered
under her guardian's roof, struck and touched all
there with that ethereal and rare loveliness, of which
its own unconsciousness made not the least and most
" BOSES MY SECBET KEEP. ' 297
common charm. She was still but a beautiful child,
with all a child's unstudied grace, a child's artless
transparence; and the manner in which she had
been reared, while it had given her that nameless
ease which only belongs to high-breeding, had
brushed nothing from the innocence of a youth
which had loved the birds as its friends and the
flowers as its teachers. Her young beauty charmed
those who approached her like music, the upward
gaze of her eyes, always earnest even to sadness, had
for all the haunting sweetness of some remembered
melody, and the joyous gladness of a life, on which
no shade of sorrow had ever fallen, contrasted touch-
ingly with the mournf ulness which in moments of
silence stole over her face, born of a nature musing,
sensitive, and essentially poetic. The princes and
the peers, the statesmen and the men of pleasure,
staying at White Ladies did their best to teach her
her power by subtlest flattery and most delicate
court ; they had seen nothing for years fairer than
the way in which she listened to them in naive
surprise, and turned from them in graceful indif-
ference ; while the titled beauties, something jealous
of her, yet sought her with courtly kindness, and
wondered among themselves that Strathmore, the
coldest, most heartless, and most ascetic man of his
age, had so much of gentleness and consideration for a
young girl to whom he was merely guardian : it could
not be from her beauty, they thought, for was he not
negligent of theirs, and of all !
298 6TRATHM0BE.
To Lucille the sumptuous, glittering, brilliant life
led at the Abbey seemed to her like a cante des fies;
all had the spell of freshness for her, her light laugh
rang under the arches of the grey cloisters, her
youthful steps echoed down the vast area of the ban-
queting-hall, her eyes gazed at the Strathmore por-
traits, and the shadow which lay across the threshold
of White Ladies cast no shade upon this sunlit,
dawning life, and the winds which sighed through
the boughs of the monastic elms, and blew softly
among the long grasses over her mother's grave,
brought her no burden from the history of the lives
to which her own owed birth. She was so happy I
life looked to her so beautiful in its still half-
folded glories, like the illumined pictures of an
uncut book, like the closed leaves of the pas-
sion-flower, which keeps its richest beauty shut
in its core till the last. She was so happy!
for, for the first time, she was beneath the roof of
Strathmore; she saw him daily, hourly; she was
always in his presence, or watching for it ; she could
sit and listen to him while he spoke with his guests or
his fellow ministers, never weary of hearing the voice
which, chill in its very harmony to the ear of others,
to hers was the sweetest and most mellow music that
it knew. And her heart, child-like in its purity, but
far beyond childhood and beyond youth, in the vivid
depth of all it felt, cherished as the life of its life,
her love and reverence for him to whose guardianship
her father had bequeathed her. From her earliest
"roses my seojret keep."
years she had clung with a strange affection to
Strathmore ; while yet so young that comprehension
of his career was impossible to her, she had de-
lightedly listened to all who would tell her of his
greatness ; she loved to think how much she owed to
him, and how deep must have been his friendship for
her father that he took this care for her. All that
was powerful, generous, and grand in his character
drew her to him; all that was darker was veiled
from her; she thought it as stainless as it was un-
rivalled, and the fair, fond dreams of a luxuriant ima-
gination had clung about him as their centre till that
affection had become the religion of her life. It
seemed as though the love which her father had
borne to him had been transmitted to her: natures
such as Strathmore's, which are indifferent to love,
are not seldom those on which most love is lavished.
"What are you so absorbed in, Lucille?" asked
one of the women staying there, a certain lovely
leader of the fashion.
Lucille, half lying on a couch in the library, rest-
ing her head on her hand, looked up with a smile :
" I was reading ' Indiana.' "
Lady Chessville laughed, and turned to Strath-
more, who had just entered the library with the Duke
of Beauvoir, his son the Marquis of Bowdon, the
Prince de Volms, and Valdor.
" Lord Cecil ! here is Lucille absorbed in * Indiana.'
Do you permit that as her guardian? "
Strathmore smiled as he approached :
300 STRATHMOEE.
"Lucille will not be harmed by Georges Sand,
Lady Ohessville : Rousseau or De Kock would leave
no stain there ; the soil must be fit ere impure plants
will take root. Still you are right. Where did you
find that book, my dear ? It is not my edition, I think/'
Lucille looked at the cover.
" No ; there are not your arms on it. I found it
in my room ; it amused me, and so I brought it down.
There is a name on the title-page, though the ink is
faded. Look! Bertie Erroll.' Who was he!"
She held the book up to him, her hand on the
faded writing, her eyes raised to his, and a sharp
agony struck him again like the stab of a mortal blow,
for his grief for this sin was great and deathless.
But his smile did not change, not a muscle of his
face moved, and he took the volume without even a
moment's hesitation, carelessly glancing at the title-
page:
"Yes, it is one of ErrolTs; he was a friend of
mine. Keep the book if it amuse you, Lucille."
Lucille saw no difference from his habitual manner,
which, when others were with them, was always
gentle but cold. Lady Ohessville connected nothing
with the name, for she had been a child at the time
of that tragedy in the Deer Park of the Bois, and
the world had long since forgotten that darker story
of its successful Minister's earlier manhood. Beau-
voir, a good-hearted, kindly man, whispered to Lord
Bowdon as they went out :
"He shot that very fellow Erroll through the
"roses my secret keep." 301
heart years ago about a notorious woman, and now
speaks of him like that! Bosom friends, too, they
were ! Able man, Strathmore, very able, but cold as
ice and cruel as a Borgia. Don't know what re-
morse is ! "
So bystanders judge! Valdor alone noted, to
judge differently, the singular indifference, the peiv
feet tranquillity with which Strathmore spoke ErrolPs
name and looked upon his writing : he had seen them
precisely as calm, precisely as negligent an hour
before sunset, when he went out with a murderer's
resolve, brutal and inflexible, in his heart ; he had so
seen them when the sun had sunk, and the murderer
had stooped to sever the golden lock from the trailing
hair of the dead man; By one of those instincts
which the mind cannot trace, but which it involun-
tarily follows, it struck him that Strathmore had
spoken thus for the sake of Lucille; he would not
have thought it needful to have assumed such com-
plete indifference towards Erroll's memory merely for
men who knew how Erroll met his death, and would
have rather respected him more than less for some
show of remembrance also. From that hour she
became associated with the memory of Erroll in
Valdor^s thoughts ; he felt convinced that the cause
of Strathmore's care for his ward arose in some way
or other from her connexion with the man whom he
had slaughtered in cold blood : and Valdor was keen,
hot, eager in the scent, for all concerning Lucille
had interest for him, this guileless beautiful child,
902 8TEATHMORE.
reared in seclusion by the English shores of the
Atlantic.
Strathmore saw this interest, saw it in Valdor, as in
many others under his roof, throughout those autumnal
weeks, and it woke anger in him whenever their
glances fell on her, or their words made her eyes
grow dark and wistful in half-shrinking, half-dis-
dainful surprise, as they whispered subtle flatteries in
her ear. Anger which was twofold: first, because
they would rapidly destroy the unworn freshness and
the innocence, earnest whilst it was childlike, which
were beautiful to him in her ; last, and more, because
each might be one who would wake her heart from
its rest and imperil its peace. He had sworn to make
his atonement by securing her happiness at whatever
cost; he had looked on hers as the life on which
hung his single power of expiation. How could he
secure it when once she should have been taught to
place it in the hands or embark it in the love of any
one of those who sought to dispel her childhood by
their honeyed whispers ?
Strathmore, who held that Will can work what it
chooses, and who, in the arrogance of a great intellect,
conceived that he could mould fate like potter's clay,
felt passionate impotence as he realised that the work
of his atonement might be wrested from him incom-
plete, and dashed to pieces before his eyes. It was
here that his error had lain ; his remorse was holy
in its intense contrition, its sincere agony; but he*
did not seek its expiation in that humility and self-
" ROSES MY SECBET KEEP." 303
doubt which a great guilt may well leave upon the
proudest and most self-sustained nature : he had set
it before him as he had set the ambitions of his
public life, as a purpose to be effected by his own fore-
sight and his own will, guarded by him alone from
all chance of miscarriage, all touch of opposing will,
all danger of human accident, as his strength of
steel and his unscrupulous force bore down all that
was antagonistic to him, and pioneered his road
to power. Prostrate and chastened by misery, he
had vowed to fulfil the trust bequeathed him an
hundred-fold beyond all which that trust enjoined ;
but to the fulfilment of his oath he had gone in the
same spirit with which he had dealt out death and
meted vengeance; the spirit which reKed on the
masterly skill of his own hand to mould what form
it would, and still conceived that Life would bend
and bow to his haughty fiat : u I choose this ! "
"You gave me leave to hope ; but what chance of
hope, sir, is there for me with all these ? " said young
Caiyll, bitterly, one day, as he glanced at the knot of
titled and famous men gathered about Lucille in the
cedar drawing-room,
Strathmore had extended his invitation to the
young man, true to his promise, to give him oppoiv
tunity to advance his love on her affection, for he
was scrupulously just, and never broke his word in
private or public matters.
Strathmore smiled that smile under which young
Caryll winced as under the cut of a knife :
304 STRATHMORE.
" I gave you leave to hope, certainly ; it is for you
to give your hope a basis. I never told you / deemed
it well founded ; but you should know how to make
it so. If you have so little of the necessary love-lore,
I cannot help you ; ce riest pas h moi /"
" But but how, when she has so many to teach
her her power 1" began the youth, hesitatingly.
Strathmore raised his eyebrows :
" 'How!' If you be such a novice in the art, it
were wiser you should abandon it altogether."
He spoke with that slight laugh which was more
chill than most men's sneer; but, though his words
had stung his nephew as the young alone can be
stung by the light contempt of a man of the world,
Strathmore's disdain for him was not unmixed with a
wish that his suit might prosper. If Lucille's heart
were fastened on CarylTs love, and could be content
in it and with it, her happiness might be more surely
and safely secured than with those more brilliant in
station, who now sought her ; and over his nephew,
who would be his debtor, and whose* career would be
moulded and checked by him, he would have still a
sway, where, if she wedded any other, he would lose
his influence for her and over her life for ever. Yet
the same bitterness which had arisen when his mother
had first spoken of marriage for her, rose in him now,
as he looked across to where she stood in the conser-
vatories, caressing a bright-plumaged bird, and trying
to lure another from the topmost boughs of an orange-
tree, too absorbed in her wayward favourites to be
" ROSES MY SECRET KEEP." 305
conscious of the glances bent upon her by the group
around.
" Can they not let her alone for a few brief years,
at least ? " he mused, with an acrid impatience. " That
bird's wing which brushes her lips is fitter caress for
her than men's embraces. Marriage! Faugh! it
is profanity to speak of to think of for her !"
" Strathmore, if you are disengaged just now, give
me five minutes," said the Duke of Beauvoir, touch-
ing him on the arm at that moment.
His Grace was a heavy, cheery, generous gentle-
man, to whom Mark Lane Express panegyrics on his
prize short-horns were dearer than European enco-
miums on his policies, and who in the Cabinet was
very utterly under the lead of his subtle and astute
colleague, though the reins were so excellently ma-
naged that he was wholly unconscious of his own
docile obedience.
" I want to talk to you about a merely personal
matter," went on the Duke, as Strathmore led the
way into the billiard-room, just then empty ; " in fact,
about your young ward, Mademoiselle de Vocqsal.
Have you any marriage in view for her?"
" None, my dear Duke."
" Well ! Bowdon has lost his head about her,"
went on his Grace, in his usual sans fa^on, good-
humoured style, which flung dignity to the winds as
humbug, and yet somehow or other never entirely
lost it. " Never saw him so much in love in my life !
You've remarked it, of course, eh? He has asked
VOL. II. x
306 STBATHMORE.
me to-day to speak to you. In point of fact, I should
be very glad to see him married myself, and I have
so high an esteem for Lady Oastlemere, that I should
have been perfectly satisfied if I had known nothing
more than that the young lady he sought had been
reared under her tutelage, so I told him I would
mention the matter to you this morning. I presume
the alliance would have your concurrence ?"
u A more brilliant one it would be impossible to
find for her ! You do me the highest honour in so-
liciting her hand for Lord Bowdon," answered Strath-
more, with his suave, chill courtesy, which was never
startled into surprise as it was rarely warmed to cor-
diality. " His proposals, then, have your full sanc-
tion ? May I ask what has been said on the subject
to my ward!"
" Nq^hing ! nothing definite, at least. She is so
exceedingly young not brought out, indeed that
Bowdon and I both concurred in seeking her hand
,from you first. Will you mention it to her as you
think best?"
" With pleasure. We may postpone, then, any
further discussion of your wishes or mine until we are
aware how Mademoiselle de Vocqsal receives your
most flattering proposal!"
"How?"
His Grace looked fairly astonished a little amazed,
moreover ; it was so very new a suggestion to him
that his son, the future Duke of Beauvoir could pos-
sibly be rejected !
" BOSES MY SECEET KEEP." 307
Strathmore smiled, that suave, courtly smile which
always a little worried his noble colleague :
u My dear Beauvoir, I need not say that alliance
with your House surpasses the most splendid aspira-
tions which my ward could have indulged in for
herself, or my mother and I, as her guardians for
her; at the same time, I do not prejudge Lucille's
answer, since I should never seek to sway her inclina-
tion. But there is little fear, doubtless, of what
that answer will be; Lord Bowdon could not woo
in vain."
His Grace's pride and consternation were both
soothed, and he passed on to speak further of his
proposals in his son's name with that hearty au point
straightforwardness, which in the Cabinet made so
strong a contrast to the fine finesses and inscrutable
reticence of one who, from his earliest years of public
life, had recognised the essential art of success to lie
in knowing " how to hold truth, and how to with-
hold it."
" I must be the first, then, to taint her mind with
marriage offers !" thought Strathmore. " Rank more
brilliant could not be given her ; every woman in Eng-
land will envy her her lot ; he is a handsome, amiable,
inoffensive fool ! Such men make the kindest hus-
bands. There will be no fear for her happiness, if
if she love him. And yet, that soft, delicate, in-
nocent life ! Good God ! it is defilement !"
The thoughts flitted, scarce shaped, through his
mind; the sudden offer of the Duke's alliance had
x2
308 8TBATHMOBE.
struck him with keen, though vague pain the same
pain, hut more intense, which had smitten him when
his mother had first spoken of Lucille's future. Young
CarylTs love for her had been some distant things
viewed by him with some contempt, and subject to
long probation ; he had not realised it in connexion
with her ; but the Duke's words had set sharply and
vividly before him the inevitable certainty that, ere
long, the loveliness to which so many testified would
be sought and claimed in marriage, and that, once
given to another, his right over the life which he
alone now protected, and directed, must pass utterly
and for ever from him. She might be happy in her
husband's home, and in that happiness he would have
no share ; looking on it, he would no longer see in
the beauty of her days the symbol of his own atone-
ment : or she might be wretched in the union which
bound her, or in the grief of a wronged womanhood,
and he would be powerless to give her freedom and
consolation, and must see the life he had sworn to the
dead to keep unstained and unshadowed, consume
hopelessly before his sight !
To the man who, high in power and arrogant in
strength, had a scornful unbelief in the power of
Circumstance to overthrow Resolve, the sense of the
impotence of his will here was bitter as it was strange.
For the moment, maddened by it, he felt tempted to
exert his title as her guardian to forbid all marriage
for her, all love to her; but this, again, he was
forced to surrender; to secure her happiness, free
" BOSES MY SECRET KEEP." 309
choice must be left her, in that which thwarted, often
makes the misery of a life ; and Strathmore's nature,
merciless to others, was one to the full as inflexible
to himself in any ordeal self-chosen, any sacrifice
self-imposed. It smote him with pain, with aversion,
almost with loathing, to be the first to speak to her of
what must lead her across that boundary she had told
him wistfully she feared to pass, which oftentimes
parts Childhood from Womanhood by a single step.
He revolted from his office ; but it devolved on him
as her guardian ; as such he had accepted it, and he
went to fulfil it.
As he descended before dinner, he saw her upon
the terrace leaning over the parapet in the warm
glow of the western light, which slanted across the
broad flight of steps, and fell about her where she
stood; strange contrast, in the bright and aerial glow of
her youth, to the grey monastic walls of the Gothic
facade behind her, and the dark massed branches of
the cedars above her head.
He approached her, and laid his hand gently on
her hair, turned simply back from her brow in its
rich silken waves :
" Where are your dreams, Lucille ? "
She looked up, and the warm light which ever
came there at his presence beamed upon her face :
" I was thinking of all those who have lived and
died here ; of all the histories those grey stones could
speak ; of all the secrets which lie shrouded in thos&
woods since they saw the Druidic sacrifices, and heard
310 STHATHMORE.
the chant of the white-robed Dominicans : the dead
days seem to rise from their graves, and tell me all
that is buried with them ! "
She spoke only in the fanciful imagination which
loved to wander in the poetic mysteries of the past,
but her words now, as often, struck him with that
deadliest Nemesis of crime the doom which compels
the guilty to hear reproach in every innocent speech,
and feel a blow on unhealed wounds, in what, with-
out that remembered sin, had been but gay jest or
soft caress.
"You are too imaginative, Lucille," he said,
quickly. a Why dream of that dark past, of unholy
sacrifice and insensate superstition? The past has
nothing to do with you ; live in your own fair present,
my child. Your sunny sea-shore suits you better
than the monastic gloom of White Ladies."
She lifted her bright head eagerly :
" Oh ! I love White Ladies best."
" Surely? But Silver-rest is your home ? "
" Yes ; but this is yours."
He smiled ; all expression of her affection was dear
to him, not because affection was ever necessary to
him, but because hers was like the pardon and purifi-
cation of his crime. Then the office which he came
to execute, recurred to him ; they were alone, no
living thing near save the deer which were crossing
the sward in the distance, and the peacock trailing his
gorgeous train over the fallen rose-leaves on the
" EOSES MY SECRET KEEP." 311
marble pavement. But that solitude might be broken
any second ; he employed it while it lasted.
" Lucille ! you may command another home from
to-day, if you will."
Her eyes turned on him with a surprised, be-
wildered look, while a happy smile played about her
lips :
" Another home ! What do I want with one, Lord
Cecil?"
" Many will offer one."
The surprised wonder in her eyes deepened, she
looked at him hesitatingly, yet amused still :
"I do not understand you."
A curse rose in his throat on those who made him
destroy the yet lingering childhood, and awaken
thoughts which he himself would have bidden sleep
for ever.
"I am not speaking in enigmas, Lucille; I tell
you merely a necessary truth," he answered her
gravely. "As your guardian I have the disposal
of your future ; of that future those who love you will
each seek the charge ; it is for you, not me, to decide
to whom it is finally entrusted. His Grace of Beau-
voir has to-day sought your hand from me for his son.
What answer shall I return to Lord Bowdon ? "
Her eyes had been fixed wistfully on him as he
spoke, scarcely as if. comprehending him; at the
clearness of his last words a blush, the first he had
seen there, flushed her cheeks, her lashes drooped,
312 STBATHMOBE.
her lips parted, but without speech, and he fancied
that she shuddered slightly.
His task revolted him, he loathed it yet more in
execution than in anticipation ; but Strathmore let
no trace of repugnance appear, he addressed her
calmly and gravely, as befitted one who filled to her,
in her eyes and the world's, her father's place :
"I do not need to tell you, Lucille, that such an
alliance is almost the highest in the country, and one
of the most brilliant it would be possible to command.
His father tells me that Bowden loves you as much
even as the fancy of youth can wish to be loved. To
exaggerate the rank of the station you would fill
would be impossible, and your happiness "
" Oh hush ! hush ! it seems so strange."
The words were spoken rapidly under her breath,
and almost with an accent of terror, while the flush
was hot on her cheek, and her head was drooped and
slightly turned from him; it might be the startled
shyness of girlish love, the momentary agitation of a
flattered pride ; he took it for these, and a pain, keen
and heavy, smote him, and made his tone more
cold, though as calm and even as heretofore, as he
went on :
" Nay, you must hear me, Lucille. I but repeat to
you what the Duke has said, and it is no light matter
to be dismissed hastily either way. I am no ambas-
sador of a love-tale ; but I should err gravely in the
place I hold towards you if I did not put fully before
"roses my secret keep." 313
you the eminence of the rank for which your hand is
sought, and the splendour of the alliance into which
you may now enter "
He paused suddenly, for she turned towards him
with a swift movement and that caressing grace with
which as a little child upon the sea-shore she had
leaned against him, thinking she had done wrong to
touch a stranger's dog.
" Hush I you pain me. Why do you speak to me
so ? Are you tired of me, Lord Cecil t "
The colour still was warm in her face, but her eyes
as they questioned his were pleading and reproachful,
and there was a naive plaintiveness in the words, and
in the action, with which she turned to him, which
touched him, even while they struck him with a sense
of keen relief, of vivid pleasure : it would have cost
him more than he had counted to surrender his right
to gladden, to guide, and to control this young life ;
it would have been the surrender of ErrolFs trust, and
of his own atonement.
He drew her gently towards him with that tender-
ness which existed only for her, begotten of circum-
stance, while foreign to his nature.
" Why does it pain you, my love ! Have you heard
me aright t I but speak to you of a marriage for
which my consent has* been sought, and which is
so exalted and unexceptionable a one, that as your
guardian I should be deeply blameable if I did not
fully set before you all it offers. I should never urge
314 STEATHMORE.
your inclination, bat I must state truly all which may
await you if you accept it. Decide nothing hastily ;
to-morrow you can give me your reply."
A look of aversion shadowed her face, she clung to
him with that caressing reliance as natural and un-
restrained now as in her childhood, and lifted her eyes
in beseeching earnestness:
"Oh no! Why?' What need? Tell them at
once that I could not I could not ! "
A gladness which had never touched his life since
Marion Vavasour destroyed it, swept over him for a
moment at her words ; he loved her for the sake and
in the memory of the dead ; and he rejoiced that he
was not yet bidden to bestow her on her lover, to give
her up from his own keeping :
" It shall be as you will, Lucille. I have no other
aim save your happiness. But are you sure that you
know what you refuse ; that you may not desire to
speak of it further with my mother ? You are very
young, and a station so brilliant "
Something proud, pained, wistful, perplexed, which
came into her eyes, again arrested him; the delicate
and spiritual nature shrank from the coarser ambi-
tions imputed to her, the worldly bribe proffered to
her:
" Why do you tell me of that. Lord Cecil ? "
" Because it is my dnty as your guardian, not be-
cause I think that it would sway you. I do not.
Yours is a rare nature, Lucille."
His answer reassured her, and the shadow passed
" ROSES MT SECRET KEEP." 315
from off her face as the warm sunlight of the west
fell on it, the smile upon her lips, so like her father's
in its gladness and its sunny tenderness, that it smote
Strathmore as on the night when she had wakened
from dreaming sleep on the bosom of her dead
mother.
" Then then whenever any others speak to you
as the Duke has done, you will answer them without
coming to me ? You will say i Lucille has no love to
give strangers, and needs no guardian save the one
shehas! ,,,
He smiled, moved to mingled pain and pleasure by
her words :
u I cannot promise that, my child, for I fear they
would not rest content with such an answer. And
Lucille the future must dawn for you as for all, and
you will find other loves than those yon now know."
She put her hand up to his lips to silence him, and
her eyes grew dark and humid :
" Never ! Never ! If the future would differ from
the present, I pray God it may not dawn. Are you
weary of Lucille, Lord Cecil, that you would exile
her to other care ? "
a Never ask that ! I wish to God my care could
shield you always."
His answer sprang from the poisoned springs of a
deep and hidden remorse : she heard in it but a sure
defence and promise for the future, as he stood rest-
ing his hand upon her shoulder in the evening silence,
while the sun sank from sight behind the elm-woods,
316 STBATHMORE.
and the shadows of twilight stole over the terrace^
where the winding waters glistened through the
gloom, white with their countless river-lilies, as on
the night when Marion Vavasour had been there
beside him, wooing from his lips the first words of
that guilt-steeped love in which all the beauty of his
manhood had been cast and wrecked.
Laughing in soft, child-like gaiety for his words
had made her very glad, and banished even from
memory the momentary vague pain and fear which
had fallen on her, she scarce knew why Lucille
stooped and wound her hands in the luxuriance of the
late roses, which still blossomed in profusion over the
steps and balustrade of the cedar-terrace, covering the
white marble with their trailing leaves and scarlet
petals, and filling the air with their odour. Her hands
wandered among them with that delight in their
beauty which was inborn with her axtistic and ima-
ginative nature, and drawing one of the richest
clusters from the rest, she held them to him in their
fragrance :
" I do not wonder that the Greeks and the poets
loved the roses best, and that the Easterns gave them
to the nightingales as the burden of their song and
the choice of their love ! How beautiful they are
the Queen of Flowers ! "
The words, the action, the sight and scent of the
roses, as she held them upward to him in the twilight,
recalled, in sudden vivid agony, the memory of the
woman who had stood there with him on that very
" BOSES MY SECRET KEEP. ,, 317
spot, with the subtle, poetic lies upon her fragrant
lips, which gave the flower that she loved value and
sweetness in his sight because their kiss had rested on
its leaves : it was among the roses that he had seen
her in the morning-light at Vermon9eaux; it was
among the roses that he had seen her in the summer-
noon, when he had spared her from death only that
she might live to suffer ! And the flower was accursed
in his sight.
Those scarlet roses, with their heavy fragrance and
their clinging dews, gave him a thrill of horror as he
saw them lifted to him by the innocent hands of
Lucille; they were in his eyes the bloodstained
symbol of the assassinatress, of the destroyer !
With an irrepressible impulse he seized them from
her, and threw them far away, till they fell bruised
and scattered on the turf below.
Her look of surprise recalled him to himself.
" Roses have a faint odour to me, my dear; I have
not your love of them," he said, hurriedly. " Your
lilies of the valley become you best, Lucille ; those
roses have nothing in common with you 9 the flowers
of orgie, of revel, of secresy ! "
She looked at him surprised still, for she had never
seen his tranquil repose of manner broken until now
at White Ladies, and it seemed to her very strange
that he, the haughty and inflexible political leader,
should be thus moved by the unwelcome fragrance of
a few autumn roses !
Her eyes dwelt on him wonderingly, wistfully :
318 STRATHMOBE.
"Have I vexed you, Lord Cecil? You are not
angry with me ? "
He passed his hand softly over her hair, deeply
moved in that moment by the tender and pleading
words.
" No ! God forbid ! Act as your own heart dic-
tates, Lucille, and you will ever act as I would have
you. I rejoice that you do not risk your life in other
hands than mine. Keep your beautiful youth while
you may ! "
319
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE NIGHT WHISPEB OF THE PAST.
" So you have sent poor Bowdon away, Lucille.
It was very cruel, and a refusal must seem so re-
markably odd to him ! " laughed Lady Chessville, the
night after, as she came into the young girl's dress-
ing-room before the deshabille. The Peeress, young
and omniponent herself, was one of those women who
like the beauty and grace of others.
Lucille shook her head a little disdainfully :
" It is a cruelty" he will soon forget."
" It is not so easy to i forget ' always, mon enfant,
but you have not learnt that; you have nothing to
blot out," said the Countess. "Come, tell me,
Lucille, how could Bowdon fail to please you?
What was it you disliked in him ? I am curious ; he
is accustomed to be thought perfection."
" I did not dislike anything ; I never thought about
him at all."
320 STRATHMORE.
Lady Chessville laughed a silvery peal of hearty
laughter :
" Poor Bowdon ! if he could but hear that ! I
must really tell the Duke of the degradation to which
his beloved has come. But you are very ungrateful,
my beautiful child. Can none of them move you any
more ! I shall say your guardian has taught you his
own coldness."
The colour flushed into Lucille's face, her eyes
darkened and dilated, she raised her head eagerly,
while the rich masses of. her unbound hair shook over
her shoulders to the ground :
" l Ooldf ' You must never use that word to my
guardian. Oh ! how little you know him ! There is
no one on earth so gracious, so gentle, so generous, so
full of kindly thought and noble acts. There is the
coldness of his world, of his years, of his ambitions,
perhaps in his look and in his words, but there is no
coldness in his heart. Look what he has been to me,
merely because the father whom I lost was the friend
of his youth. Would one cold at heart cherish such
a memory so sacredly, and fulfil a trust of the dead
so unweariedly? "
The firelight shone warmly on her upraised face,
through which the soul within seemed itself to beam ;
her eyes looked upward proudly and lovingly, with
the bright hair brushed from her flushed brow, and
her lips slightly parted with the eager words; she
might have been painted for Vivia Perpetua in her
young and holy loveliness, willing to endure all things
THE NIGHT WHISPER OP THE PAST. 321
even unto death in defence and in reverence for her
Lord.
Lady Chessville looked at her and sighed: there
was that in Lucille's face which vaguely touched to
sadness all those who gazed on her.
" He was your father's friend ?" she said, musingly.
" I never knew that ! "
"Yes; and he loved him so well!" answered
Lucille, while her voice grew low and tremulous,
recalling the memory of him whom Strathmore had
taught her to dream of with more than a filial affec-
tion, hallowed towards the dead as it could never
have been to the living. " I cannot^ remember him,
but Lord Cecil has spoken of him to me till I think
of him as dearly as though he were living now. He
died in my infancy, Lord Cecil was with him at his
death, and it is because they had lived as brothers
that he has such goodness and tenderness for me.
Do you think any man, cold at the core of his heart,
could retain such a memory of one lost friend? It
will show you alone that the beauty of his character
to those who know it aright, equals the greatness of
his career ; eclipse it, it cannot do ! "
"You are eloquent for your guardian, Lucille,"
said Lady Chessville. "What you tell me speaks
very differently for Strathmore than what society
says usually ; we all know his intellect, his power, his
statesmanship, are masterly, but we never held him
anything but icily heartless with his subtle, delicate
sneer, and his world-steeped egotism. I remember,
VOL. II. y
322 STBATHMOEE.
I fancy, however I don't exactly know what but
I think I once heard that many years ago he was
passionately in love with some woman who deserted
or betrayed him ; did yon ever hear anything of it,
Lucille?"
u Never I " She started a little, and a certain look
of disquiet and pain shadowed the eyes which were
gazing happily and dreamingly at the flashing fire-
rays.
"Ah! I dare say not," said the Countess, with a
Kttle yawn of ennui. "It was a romantic, terrible
story, I imagine ; it was so long before my time that
I never heard any particulars, but very likely it may
be the reason of his utter indifference to women. I
cannot possibly picture Lord Cecil Strathmore loving
anything but power, or heeding anything save him-
self ! But you will rebuke me if I say so, ma belle ;
and since he is so kind to you, I shall do my best to
believe that there is a heart under that polished sur-
face of courtly and ministerial ice."
Lucille did not seem scarcely to hear her ; her eyes
were fixed with their gaze of vague disquiet on the
ruddy glisten of the fire-flames.
" Betrayed him deserted him," she muttered, mu-
singly. u Oh, surely no woman could "
Lady Chessville looked up quickly and scanned
her face, from which the warm colour had faded;
and she passed her hand caressingly over Lucille's
brow as she rose.
"Good night, my lovely child. Do not sit up
THE NIGHT WHISPER OP THE PAST. 328
and think over that bygone story I was silly
enough to name to you ; you may be very sure that
Strathmore has never suffered, and (I would stake
much) has never loved, even in his early years,
except, indeed, perhaps, as people petri du monde
as he is do love, which is very worthlessly. I will
not have you waste so much of your thoughts and
tenderness on your guardian, Lucille that cold,
negligent, ambitious man, whose only passion is
power ! "
Lucille drew slightly away from her hand, and a
faint smile came on her lips.
"You only know Lord Cecil as the world knows
him, Lady Chessville ; he merits from me a thousand-
fold more than all- the gratitude and reverence I can
give him."
The Countess looked at her again in silence for a
moment, then stooped to give her a light kiss, and
floated from the chamber. Lucille sat where she had
left her, not changing her attitude, but, with her
head bent forward and her hands lying lightly on her
bosom, gazed into the hot and glowing embers of the
burning wood, with a vague and unknown sadness
oppressing her, she knew not why.
Strathmore had told her aright that one day suffices
to destroy for ever the barrier which parts childhood
from womanhood; and Lucille had that day lost
much of the golden radiance of childhood, which
is happy in its unconsciousness and content in its
present. But what had dispelled it, was not so much
324 STBATHMOBE.
the love which had been proffered to her, which,
though it had startled her for the moment, had had
so little hold on her thoughts, that it had been shaken
off from them, leaving nothing of its significance,
and having taught nothing of its knowledge ; it was
rather this shadowy love of a long dead past, of
which she had heard to-night, which woke in her own
heart an unfamiliar pain, and made her wistfully
muse on its meaning and its story.
For the first time in all her innocent and guarded
life she felt an intangible disquiet and uneasiness,
and, rising, she went, as was her nightly custom, to
Lady CastJemere's chamber before going to rest her
own apartments had been altered by Strathmore's
order, and now adjoined his mother's, in the west
wing of the abbey. She was received with the
affection which had encircled her only too tenderly
from her infancy, and which the peeress in her
aged years did truly feel to this bright and loving
child, who had been given to her care by so dark
a tragedy, orphaned by her son's own hand, and
made desolate by his crime. Haughty still to most
others, his mother was invariably gentle to Lucille ;
and her hand fondly stroked now the floating silken
masses of loosened hair, as she lay at her feet in the
warmth of the fire-glow resting her head against her
knee ; Lucille loved warmth and light like any tropic
bird.
They were in strange contrast^ the age and the
youth the grave and venerable patrician, bowed by
THE NIGHT WHISPER OF THE PAST. 325
the weight of many years, while something of the
fire of her superb womanhood still gleamed from
her proud sunken eyes ; and the young girl in all the
dawning glory of her unspent life, with the grace of
childhood in every pliant limb, and the unworn bright-
ness of childhood in the bloom of her cheek and the
golden light of her hair.
"You are silent to-night, Lucille ?" she said,
gently, at last, when some minutes had passed by.
" Where are your thoughts ? "
The colour stole into her face, and she did not lift
her head from where it rested.
"I was thinking I was thinking, Madame of
what Lady Chessville said just now."
" And what was that ? "
" Madame" was the familiar title Lucille had given
her when too young to pronounce her name, and
Lady Castlemere had encouraged her to continue it,
since it supported the foreign extraction from which
all were led to attribute her birth.
" You can tell me, Madame, did did Lord Cecil,
many years ago, ever love any woman who betrayed
him?"
The hand which lay on her waving tresses moved
with an involuntary start. Had any been hinting to
Lucille the outline of that tragedy so long, so scrupu-
lously, so anxiously concealed from her! had any
been unfolding the first pages of that dark history,
which, opened to her, would reveal to her that the
hand which she loved, and which cherished her, was
326 STRATHMOEE.
the hand which had slain her father, as the pitiful
among men would not have slain a brute !
But with the blood of the Strathmores in her veins,
his mother had the inscrutable serenity under trial of
her Norman race; and she looked down into the
girl's wistful eyes with calm surprise.
"Why do you ask, Lucille f It is a strange
question."
"But tell me, is it truef Did he ever love any
one who was faithless to him ? "
Her voice was very earnest, even to tremulousness,
and in her upraised eyes there was a plaintive anxiety ;
and her listener saw that entire denial would rather
increase than lessen the little Lucille could as yet
know of the truth.
"Long ago, my love, Strathmore loved unwisely
and unhappily. But it is a matter so entirely of the
past, that it is folly to recal it ; and you must never
allude to it to your guardian. What was it, Lady
Chessville could tell you ; she was a mere child in his
early manhood."
"She told me very little. She said she knew
nothing; but she had heard of the story, and she
thought it was the reason why he was now so cold.
Why should she call him cold ; he is not ? "
"Not cold in your sense, my dear, but in hers.
He feels deeply here and there as he feels for you,
and for the memory of your father ; but Lady Chess-
ville means that he has long ago left to younger men
THE NIGHT WHISPEB OF THE PAST. 327
the follies of love, and is entirely given to political
life. In her sense she is right."
Lucille's head drooped again ; and as the firelight
flickered on her face, it wore its unwonted look of
new disquiet, of brooding and unanal ysed pain.
" Oh! how could any woman betray him? w she
said, half aloud, with an accent in her voice it had
never borne before. a How could any one forsake
him and make him suffer throw away such a trea-
sure as his love?' 9
Lady Castlemere caught the intonation of the
words, and stooped to look upon her face ; a thought
crossed her which filled her with a ghastly and hor-
rible terror. Better, better, she felt, that Lucille should
learn the truth of that fatal history, shrouded from her
birth learn it in all its hideous nakedness, its mer-
ciless and deliberate crime, and learn to shrink from
the hand she loved and honoured, as the hand stained
with her father's blood, than that the fear which
crossed his mother's thoughts as she looked on her
should ever ripen into truth !
" Lucille ! " she said, almost hurriedly, " do not let
your thoughts wander into buried years of which you
can tell nothing, and which can be nothing to you,
my child. It is sorrow wasted, to grieve for so long
dead a thing as your guardian's past. All men love,
some wisely, some erringly, but love he himself has
long abandoned and put aside ; it had a charm for
him in his earlier years, but it can never now be any-
328 STBATHMOBE.
thing to him, not even a regret ; therefore waste no
regret for him. In the ambitious life of a statesman,
such weaknesses are quickly forgotten ; associate
them with Lord Cecil no more than you would
have thought to do with your father, whose place he
fills."
Her words were purposely chosen; and Lucille
listened silently, her head bent, her eyes gazing at
the falling embers, the warm colour in her face
wavering. The vague pain still weighed upon her,
and each syllable fell chilly on her, like the touch
of a cold blast ; the last yet more than any.
" Lucille ! look at me," said his mother, anxiously.
The terror which had floated through her mind
strengthened with that silence, and the shadows
which flickered over the face she watched. Lucille
raised her head with a half-broken sigh, and her fair
eyes looked upwards to her gaze, guiltless, fearless,
trustful, even while their natural sadness was deep-
ened : the fear which had seized on her watcher
was slaked for the time; if it had grounds, as she
prayed it might never have, she saw that Lucille, at
the least, as yet knew nothing of her own secret. She
bent and kissed her.
" Go to your bed now, my darling ; it is late, and
you are used to early hours at Silver-rest. And,
Lucille, the question you have asked of me you will
not ask of others? it would displease your guar-
dian."
THE NIGHT WHIBPEB OP THE PAST. 329
A faint, proud smile, tender and mournful, came
on Lucille's lips as she arose :
"Oh! Madame, yon are scire his name is too
sacred to me to talk of it idly with any ! I would
never have asked of Lord Cecil's past of any one save
' yourself."
And his mother knew, as the girl's good-night
caress lingered on her brow, that Lucille spoke
the truth; that unless any remorseless hand tote
down the veil which hid the past, and forced upon
her sight the secret which it shrouded, her lofty
and delicate nature would never imperil its own
peace by restless search or curious interrogation.
Yet the new and different fear which had arisen
in her that night for the first time could not be
banished ; and, as she sat in solitude, she shuddered
at the memory with which a long and varied life
supplied her the memory of how often, baffling
men's justice and men's expiation, the harvest of the
past, sown by the guilty, is reaped by the guiltless,
and the curse of sin lies in wait to prey on the in-
nocent.
In her own chamber, Lucille did not at once
obey the words which had bade her seek rest. She
dismissed her attendant earlier than usual, and
stood alone gazing into the embers of the hearth,
* while the little spaniel which had loved her father
nestled to her bosom, and her eyes grew dark and
humid in deep and dreaming thought. This cause -
VOL. II. Z
330 STRATHMORE.
less pain was on her still; she could not have told
why.
A long-drawn breath, broken as a sigh, uncon-
sciously parted her lips as she turned at last from
watching the wood-sparks fall in showers on the
crimson ashes, laid the little dog down upon his
cushions, and, moving to the nearest window, drew
the curtains aside, and looked out at the night. It
was almost a habit with her : from infancy she had
loved to watch the stars shining over the face of the
ocean, which had been to her a living poem, a never-
ending joy, a divine mystery, a beloved friend ; here
the distant sea was hidden by stretches of wood and
hill, but its f amiliar murmurs reached her ear upon
the stillness, and the stars were many in the bloudless
skies. She stood looking out into the brilliant night,
over the vast forests and the monastic ruins of White
Ladies those silent yet eloquent relics of a long-
dead pastr as the moonlight shone through shivered
arch and ivy-covered aisle, on crumbling cloisters
and decaying altar-stones, memorials of a religion
and a race whose place now knew them no more.
Below her windows ran the cedar-terratee, white and
broad in the moonlight, with the roses growing over
its balustrade, and covering its pavement; and the
fantastic coils and branches of their foliage caught
her eyes, and brought the memory of Strathmore's
action, and of Strathmore's words :
" He called them ' the flowers of orgie, the flowers
of secresy ; ' perhaps he associates them with her/ 9
THE NIGHT WHISPER OP THE PAST. 331
she thought. "Oh! how can they say he never
suffered? how can they know? His love must have
been so strong, and his suffering as great! Who
could she be, that guilty woman, who could give him
misery and betrayal "
And the dangerous thoughts, which wandere4
dimly, and blindly towards a dark and unknown
past, filled her heart with their pain and her eyes
with their tears tears rare and unfamiliar, which
gathered there, but did not fall.
Then she turned away from the silvered light
lying on the sward, and leaving in deeper shadow the
masses of the woodland ; it looked chill and mournful
to her and, kneeling down beside her bed, while the
glow of the warm wood-fire gleamed on her loosened
hair and on her young bowed head, Lucille prayed
her nightly prayer to God, for him whom she knew
only as her father's friend.
CHAPTER I.
UNDER THE AISLE OF THE PALMS.
Of the many who at White Ladies flattered the
beauty and sought to win the smile of Strathmore's
ward, the only one to whom Lucille gave heed, was
Valdor.
She was indifferent to all ; they neither banished
her childhood, nor taught her her power ; and the
graceful flatteries which might have done so, she
heard half amused, half surprised, while they fell
from her thous^hts as the rain falls from rose-leaves,
leaving no stain behind. To Valdor alone she showed
favour ; not because his pursuit of her was made with
all the skill and fascination which lengthened ex-
perience in woman's favour had lent him, but because
she found in him what she thought a sincere friend-
ship towards Strathmore, which she found in no
other. The young girl perceived, what she did not
VOL. III. B
Z STEATHMOEE.
reason on, that Stratlimore was ratlier followed and
respected as one of the chiefs of a gieat party, than
surrounded by men's warmer sympathies: and that,
while he led and influenced them, he lived isolated
from, because independent and negligant of, their
personal cordiab'ly. This ^lie never traced to its due
cause, which lay in his own neglect and contempt of
the esteem and support which most men seek his
own cold and all-Gufficing self-reliance, which with-
drew him from the pale of human sympathies. SJie
blamed for it a world which she thought did not read
aright a character that, in her sight, was little less
than god-like. And the single reason which made
her listen to and like Yaldor was, because he spoke
to her as Strathmore's friend.
He did not wholly mistake the cause which gave
him this preference ; he knew women too well, and
read this soilless and transparent heart at a glance ;
but the very sense, which he felt from the onset, that
he who had been the courted of patrician coquettes
might perchance fail here, lent his love but fresh
charm and new excitement. He saw that the way to
Lucille's confidence and regard was to speak of
Strathmore to her as she held him ; and this way he
took with the subtle tact of the world. Strathmore
himself watched his intercourse with her with vigi-
lance, almost with apprehension, which at times fore-
shadowed to him wdiat, in the face of the past, he re-
fused to acknowledge that circumstances may net in
the power and outweigh the might of the finest fore-
UNDER THE AISLE OF THE PALMS. 6
siglit, the keenest strength; a creed he scornfulty
left to wealdier and humbler men. It was not with-
out fear that he saw approach her one who had read
the murderer's intent within him ere the shot had sped
home and the life had fled.
But all knew that history, though the world had
long since let it drop into oblivion, buried by that
sure palliator of all error ;success. Moreover, he
relied upon two things ; first, that none would ever
whisper to her evil of one who stood in her sight and
theirs as her legal guardian ; and again, which was-
yet more sure, that the secret of her birth had been
so carefully suppressed, its every slightest trace
effaced, its every faintest link broken and buried,,
that nothing could ever suggest it to the wildest
dreamer or the subtlest speculator. Careful provision
and fortunate accident combined to make it impos-
sible that the will of Erroll, which was to his destroyer
more sacred than any law, could ever be disobeyed
the will which had written, "Never let her know
that it was by your hand I fell."
" Lady Chessville tells me, mademoiselle, that your
father was Strathmore's friend. Perhaps I knew him
also," said Yaldor, one day, as they rode homeward
through the deer-forest with the river making music
as it wound under the leaves, and foamed over granite
boulders.
Lucille turned to him with glad surprise ; " Do
you think so *? "
" I think most probably. I knew many, indeed
B 2
4 STEATHMOKE.
most, of Stratlimore's friends, I must ask liim, for
I would give much to recal in the past one who stood
so nearly to yow."
He spoke gently, for Valdor saw that her nature
was one to be wooed by tenderness, but revolted by
flattery ; his eyes were eloquent, his voice meaning,
but Lucille' s gaze met his witli the innocent look of
a child, grateful for his interest in her father, but
unconscious of his homage to herself.
" He was my guardian's dearest friend," she an-
swered him. " You may believe how much so, when
you see how, for my father's sake alone, he gives
such care to me."
" Indeed ! I can well believe it, for I know that
he can feel very deeply, act very generously, though
the world looks on him as cold and austere."
" Ah ! but what can the world know of him ? It
sees him in office, it discerns his intellect, it listens
to his eloquence, it admires his statecraft, but what
can it know of his nature ? Such men as he do not
court the world, they lead it ; they show the chill iron
glove to the masses they rule, it is only the few to
whom it is given to feel the warm, firm touch of the
generous hand, which is mailed for the many."
The sun shone down through the leaves upon her
face bright with reverent eloquence, while her eyes
darkened, her colour deepened, her voice grew low
and tender : she was very lovely in that sudden glow
of proud rejoicing, mingled vdth the poetic venera-
tion which she gave to one whose darker traits were
UNDER THE AISLE OF THE PALMS.
all veiled from her, whose lawless passions she knew
of no more than she knew of the evil and the bitter-
ness of human life, from which he had guarded her.
Valdor for the first time forgot his tact and his
resolve in the irritation of a jealous impatience.
" We who know him, mademoiselle," he answered,
quickly, "are accustomed, on the contrary, to say
that Strathmore has an iron hand under a silken
glove. I have seen it grip very brutally, though (to
be just to him) I have known it give very generously.
Why feel so much gratitude to him as your guardian ?
It is an office most men would but too gladly dis-
charge to such a ward ; and you do not know that
he remains, now yom^ early years are passed, so wholly
and purely disinterested I "
" Disinterested ! " She echoed his last word in
wonder, in rebuke, in as much resentment as could
be roused in a nature which had all the gentle soft-
ness of her father's ; and, in truth, she did not even
faintly understand him.
" Yes, you have yet to learn your own loveliness,
your own power!" said Valdor, with impetuous bit-
terness ; " and Strathmore, though he is an ascetic
now, may not be dead to all the passions which once
ruled him quite as utterly as ambition does at the
present."
The moment his words were spoken he repented
them ; he knew how rash and ill-advised they were,
by the effect they wrought. Her eyes gazed at him
like the eyes of a startled bird, darkened and dilating ;
b STEATHMOEE.
the colour burned in her face with a deep and painful
flush; she breathed fast and unevenly. His words
flashed on her as lightning flashes before the sight,
bringing a vague, voiceless terror, and throwing its
sudden gleam on depths and danger never feared or
known before. With an unconscious, irresistible im-
pulse, half born of the innocent shyness of childhood,
half of newly-startled consciousness, Lucille shrank
from his side, and rode after those who were in front,
as swiftly and breathlessly as the fawn flees from the
stag-hounds.
" Lucille ! what has frightened you?" asked Strath-
more, in surprise, as he glanced at her face where the
warm light fell on it through the crim-son and amber
leaves of the autumn foliage.
" Nothing."
And in truth she could not have told what it was
which filled her with a sudden breathless terror, nor
what is was which mingled with that terror an un-
known, nameless sweetness, which seemed to tremble
through all her life. Yaldor vainly strove to ap-
proach her; he was bitterly resentful with his own
folly in having let such words escape him in the mo-
ment of jealousy, for he did not believe them himself.
Mainly swayed by impulse and caprice, of a trans-
parent and impetuous character, little altered at the
core by its surface of indolence and indifferentism,
he was consumed with angry self-remorse that he had
allowed such words to escape him, treacherous to his
host, and indelicate to her. He saw that they had
UNDEE THE AISLE OF THE PALMS. 7
startled, alarmed, shocked her with a force he had
never foreseen ; whether they had revolted her by the
supposition of such a passion in one who filled to hjer
her father's place, or whether they had awakened her
to that which she had never dreamed before, was a
doubt which unceasingly tortured him, crossed now
and again by a hope that this half child-like, half
woman-like terror might be born of some feeling for
himself. The very action with which she had fled
from him w^as not unlike the first dawn of love in
such a nature as Lucille' s, spiritual as Una's, poetic as
Undine's, which seemed
Too pure even for the purest human ties.
He was impatient till he made his peace mth her ;
impatient till by look or word from her he could put
his last faint and new-born hope to test. Brilliant?
handsome, and still young, the French noble was par-
donably sure of his fascination over women ; here, for
the first time, he misdoubted his power, perhaps be-
cause, for the first time, he genuinely and honourably
lolled.
He saw a change in her when they met again a few
hours later ; slight, not to be defined, yet something
which was unmistakable The colour was deeper and
more uncertain on her cheek, the lashes drooped over
her eyes, which had lost the clearness and cloudless-
ness of their regard, and on her face there was a new
look, half light, half shadow ; the transparent waters
of her thoughts had been stirred and troubled, never
again to know their perfect peace.
8 STKATHMOEE.
Valdor knew its cause, and his pulses beat quicker
as he thoun-ht that it mio;ht be himself for whom
stirrred that still half-conscious love. Strathmore saw
it also ; when he addressed or approached her, her
eyes no longer met his own in glad smiles or pleading
earnestness ; he saw that something had been said or
done to her to scare away the unthinking peace of
childhood, as a single touch suffices to scare from its
rest the brooding bird.
He turned to young Caryll as he passed him in the
drawino;-rooms in the evening; :
" Have you broken your word ? "
The youth started and looked bewildered ; the angry
colour flushed his face :
" No, Sir. I have the same blood in my veins that
you have ! "
The answer was spirited, and to its truth the young
man's candid, unflinching glance bore witness. Strath-
more bowed his head with that warm, frank smile now
so rare upon his lips :
" True ! The question wronged you, and I beg
your pardon sincerely for having insulted you
with it."
Lionel Caryll had disliked and feared him before,
had dreaded his word, and shunned his presence ; at
the courtly amende rendered, because it was his due,
as gracefully to a young dependent kinsman as it
would have been to the highest among his peers, the
youth saw for the first time all that was generous and
best in his nature, and ceased to marvel that Lucille
UNDEE THE AISLE OF THE PALMS. 9
found much to venerate, and much which fascinated
her, in a character which until now had seemed to
him to possess many grand traits, but not one human
sympathy.
" Mile. Lucille, you shun us," whispered Yaldor
softly, late that night, as he was at last alone with her
in one of the conservatories, whither, missing her from
the circle, he had tracked, and found her ; the light
from above falling on her, about her broad-leaved
palms, brilliant creepers, and eastern citron-trees, while
the waters of the fountain by which she stood fell
musically in the silence.
She started.
" I did not shun you. I only came to fetch my
spaniel."
" The dog is very dear to you, is he not ? "
" Yes ! He was my father's ; the only thing I have
of his."
Yaldor looked at her in her silence where she leaned
against the marble basin : that fugitive likeness which
perpetually evaded him wavered before him now, and,
like some strong light which brings what is shadowy
into palpable shape, the memory of one whom he had
often seen in the very place where she now stood,
arose before him, invoked by the groundless fancy
with w^hich he had associated her. In the remem-
brance of Erroll, he saw whose it was that her face
recalled to him, and the wild dreaming folly of a
thought he had contemned grew into a sudden vivid
10 STRATHMOEE.
belief, rootless, unproved, untenable, but clear as the
day in his sight. Was this Strathmore's secret ?
" The spaniel is very happy to have such a claim to
your affection," he said gently, and almost hesitatingly,
for she arrested the words of flattery and love upon
his lips. To whisper of passion to this beautiful child
seemed impossible.
She did not answer perhaps she did not hear him ;
but she bent her head till her lips touched the shining
silky curls of the dog. As he saw the caress given to
the animal, by the young lips which he longed to teach
to tremble and grow warm under a lover's kiss, the
new hope that he cherished stirred and strengthened
in him. Pie bent tenderly towards her :
" Lucille, you so gentle to a dog, will be merciful
to me ! I deeply regret the words which I was so
rude as to offend you with to-day ; will you forgive
them?"
She did not raise her head, but he saw the colour
rise, deepen, and burn on her cheek, and her heart
beat with quick, uncertain throbs; they gave him
more than hope, almost certainty itself, and he stooped
lower still, fearful of scaring this shy and dawning
love from him by a too swift grasp.
" I would not for an empire breathe one word which
should ever wound you, and I spoke in haste and
error. You will forgive me, will you not ? "
Resentment could not exist in her nature; she
turned to him and held out her hand, with pardoning
and winning grace :
UNDER THE AISLE OF THE PALMS. 11
" Ohj monsieur, yes ! I forgive "
As his lips touched her hand in gratitude more
eloquent than speech could offer, the broad drooping
leaves of the tropical foliage fringing the path through
the conservatories moved ; and Strathmore, who had
that moment entered from the rooms beyond, stood
looking on them. He saw the blush on Lucille's face,
as it still lingered there he saw the kiss which Yaldor
left upon her hand, and he knew then who had
wrought that shadow of disquiet on her face, who had
banished childhood and awakened love.
Yaldor released her, and turned to Strathmore with
the easy carelessness of a man of the world :
" My lord ! I tell Mademoiselle Lucille that you
and I have had so many friends in common, that I feel
sure I must have known her father. Did I do so ? "
" I told you once, no doubt you did."
" But not well enough to recal him ? Dieu ! that
comes of leading a crowded life ! Wait ! I think I
knew a De Yocqsal once, one of the Yiennese Bureau-
cracy ; was it he ? "
" No ! not the same race. I remember whom
you mean, but he is a governor in Galicia at the
present time. There are none of Lucille's family
living."
He spoke so naturally that Yaldor was for the mo-
ment deceived; there could be no mystery here, it
must be a chimera of his own imagining a bubble
without substance ! At that moment the groom of
the chambers approached him with a special despatch,,
12 STRATHMORE.
marked " Immediate." And with an apology he
quitted the conservatory, and left them.
Strathmore was alone with her, and the silence
between them was for once unbroken, save by the
falling of the fountains ; and for the first time he
saw that she stood embarrassed before him, that her
eyes shunned his, and that she bent away from his
gaze over the border of the marble basin. It smote
him with a fierce and cruel pain. This was the first
simi of the alienation which would ensue between
them when her heart wandered to her lover to her
husband.
But, whatever he was to all others, with her he
allowed no personal feeling to move him from that
gentleness which he rendered her, for in his eyes she
was sacred, and to secure her peace he would have
sacrificed himself at any cost. He bent towards her,
and his eyes, cold and unrevealing, the eyes " fathom-
less and darkly-wise" of the Legend, softened with an
unspeakable sadness :
" Lucille ! have you a secret from me ? "
The reproach quivered to her heart, and her face
grew pale, even to the lips. She started and trembled
as she leant over the water, playing with the lilies on
its surface, and the pain of alienation smote him
deeper and more cruelly he was answered.
He had not deemed it possible that this young life
so late laid bare to him in its every thought, wish,
and instinct, could learn so soon to harbom' a conceal-
ment from him. But his voice did not lose its gen-
UNDER THE AISLE OF THE PALMS. 13
tleness, nor his eyes their fondness, as he bent still
downward to her :
" Lucille ! will you not trust me with it ? No one
can already have taught you doubt of how entirely I
am sure to sympathise with your every wish, and give
you happiness, if human means can make it ? "
She lifted her head quickly, and in her eyes were
all their old love and reverence.
" Doubt you ? Oh no ! I could as soon doubt the
goodness and the mercy of God "
He passed his hand over her brow caressingly.
" Then tell me what has changed you since this
morning ? What is this new barrier, my child, which
has arisen between us ? "
The colour burned afresh in her cheeks, her eyes
glanced at him shy, hauntingly, half ashamed, yet filled
with a new light, then drooped beneath his own.
He stood silent beside her for a moment, mastering
that bitter pain which gnawed within him : a stern
word or a harsh thought he would not have given to
her to purchase his own life. He waited till he could
speak calmly and gently.
" Lucille, tell me as your guardian I have a title
to ask did you refuse the Marquis of Bowden's
hand, because your own preference turned to some
other?"
The flush deepened over her brow and bosom, and
she twisted the lily-leaves unconsciously together, as
she stooped over the fountain away from his gaze:
again her silence answered him.
14 STEATHMOEE.
" Lucille, can you not trust me in so little ? Tell
me whom it is that you love ? "
He had no answer, save the flush which burned and
wavered in her face, the tremble of the drooped eye-
lids, the quiver in the silent lips, as she bent down
over the water these were eloquent enough. Leaning
over the fountain, she too saw her face reflected in
the water, saw all that it told, and all the change
which had come there, and with a sudden movement,
almost of alai'm, she turned and would have left him
his hand arrested her.
" Lucille, I will not force your confidence, but I
must sue for it. I did not think that a few hours of
a new and dearer fancy could have so soon estranged
you from me."
His voice was gentle still, but the restrained pain
and rebuke in his words vibrated through it ; her
swift desertion from him stung him painfuUy. Held
by his hand, she stood motionless for a moment, her
head drooped, her face flushed with its hot, betraying
blush ; then she broke from him, and throwing her-
self down beside the fountain, with her head bowed,
she sobbed bitterly tears half sweet, half bitter, born
from what spring she barely knew, risen from the
heart which was half unconscious, half fearful of all
which was waking in it. Her tears were terrible to
him! they were the mockery of all the care and
prescience with which he had sought to work out his
atonement by the guardianship of this single existence
from every touch of pain or misery! And mortal
UNDEE THE AISLE OF THE PALMS. 15
griefs seemed to have no part or sliare with Lucille's
life.
These broken, voiceless sobs thrilled like fire
through his soul, callous to pain, and dead to mercy
with all others ; he raised her fondly from where she
knelt, and drew her to him till her bright head was
bowed ujjon his breast.
" Lucille, my child, what has been done to you ?
Have any dared to grieve to pain to tamper with
you?"
She turned her eyes on him one moment, be-
seeching and fearful through their tears :
" No, no ! I do not know why what "
The words were barely above her breath, hurried
and tremulous; her face was very pale now, her
glance shunned his : at that instant the leaves were
swept aside by some entrance from the rooms beyond,
and starting from him, Lucille fled through the
screen of Oriental foliage, and left him ere he could
arrest her.
Yaldor had entered.
Strathmore stood silent by the fountain, under the
fan-like leaves of the palms and banyans, his face as
white and fathomless as the marble on which his hand
leaned, and he did not greet the approach of his friend
and guest by word or sign, as the other hurried to
him with an open letter in his hand.
" Kead that, Strathmore, and you will see, however
rude it be, that I am compelled to leave your hospi-
tality to-night."
16 STEATHMOEE.
Stratlimore glanced at the paper silently, and re-
turned it : he was intimate with all the hopes, plans,
and intrigues of Yaldor's party. He neither favoured
nor condemned them, but it was a portion of his policy
to be more thoroughly and early acquainted than any
other with the movements of all foreign schisms or
projects, and Yaldor, passionate, transparent, and
open as the day, with all the chivalry and indiscre-
tion which have so fatally characterised all extreme
Royalists of every age, confided in and to him without
reserve.
" I much regret a summons which will deprive me
of the pleasure of your society," he said, with cold
courtesy. " But since you must leave us imme-
diately, there is a subject on which I desire to speak
with you at once."
Valdor looked up, his animated and eloquent eyes
losing all their languor :
" You do not desire it more than I. No doubt
you mean concerning my love for your young ward ?
perhaps you imagine that I may have been without
serious thought or intent "
" I imagine nothing I never imagine I " said
Strathmore, impatiently. " I have the honour to
await your explanation."
" Pardieu ! it lies in one word love I " answered
the French noble, the indolence and indifference of
custom breaking away before the warmth of his
passion. " Strathmore, I know well enough you will
command offers of marriage for her far more brilliant
UNDER THE AISLE OF THE PALMS. 17
than mine; many will offer her riches, affluence,
station, all that I have lost in a thankless cause and
for a lethargic prince ; but rank better than mine
there is not in Europe, and love truer and warmer she
will never win than she has roused in me "
" Had you not better pour out all this eloquence in
her own ear? I fear I interrupted your tender scene
a few moments ago ? " interrupted Strathmore, in his
soft and languid voice, the slight sneer falling like
ice-water on the impassioned and eager tones of the
chivalrous Legitimist.
Valdor pardoned the sneer for the permission it
conveyed :
" Can I do so ? Finding you alone I feared she
might have retired for the night ; it is so late. God
only knows how bitter it is to me to leave her at all
above all without a farewell but what can I do?
My honour is involved."
Strathmore did not answer, but rang for the groom
of the chambers :
" Order horses to be put to, horses to post twenty
miles ; but inquire first if Mile, de Yocqsal be in the
drawing-rooms."
The servant returned in a few minutes :
" Mile, de Vocqsal has gone to her own apartments
for the night, my lord."
Strathmore signed to him to retire :
" It is impossible you see," he said briefly, as they
were left alone ; and with these few words he crushed
out, as a matter of not the slightest moment, the glad,
VOL. III. C
18 STRATHMOEE.
vivid hope lie had inspired, whose disappointment
made Yaldor's cheek pale as he turned away with a
swift movement and paced the conservatory with
fast, uneven steps. Suddenly he halted before
Strathmore, who had not moved from his position,
standing under the palm-trees, with his hand on the
marble basin.
"I must trust myself to your mercy and inter-
cession then. Will you be my ambassador with
her?"
" Have you grounds for supposing she returns your
love?"
Yaldor hesitated a moment :
" Grounds ? No. I dare not say that I have,
though she has seemed at times to prefer me to
others, and to-night ^"
" What of to-night? The question was sharp and
imperious.
" To-night I could have sworn that her heart had
wakened, and wakened for me ; her blush, her
shyness tell me, you saw her the moment I had left
her do you believe that I deceive myself or not ? "
" I believe that you do not. I believe that Lucille
loves you."
The answer was cold, but it was rigid to truth.
There was this that was grand in Strathmore's
nature he never spared himself ; and those words
had judged him justly which had drawn him " a
dangerous man always, but a false man or a mean
man never."
1
UNDER THE AISLE OF THE PALMS. 19
Valdor's face liglitenecl with a frank, glad, pas-
sionate joy :
" Thank God ! And when I return you will give
her to me ? "
" I will never oppose what concerns her happi-
ness."
" And I may ask you to be my intercessor now? "
went on Valdor, swiftly, in the quick eagerness of a
nature which knew hot joy and scorned a timorous
hesitance as cowardice, as he stood before Strathmore
in the midnight silence under the aisle of the palms.
"I am compelled to leave her in what will seem to
her a manner so cold and sti'ange, that it may well
look incompatible with any love worthy the name ;
may I trust to you to make it clear to her why I go,
and why I could not wait even for the assurance and
the farewell to-morrow could have given ? Will you
leave no doubt, no cloud, no mystery, on my depar-
ture which might wound her or chill her towards me,
as one who has not loved her as she has a right to be
beloved? Will you feel for me in the absence, to
which every law of honour binds me, in the moment
of all others when honour is most hard to follow ?
will you remember that I am driven from her in the
very hour when I have learnt to love as I never
learnt before ? and while I am far away, defenceless
and powerless against all those who will strive to rob
me, will you guard for me what you yourself believe
that I have won ? "
Strathmore listened, the lids drooped over his eyes,
c2
20 STBATHMORE.
his face impassive as the marble against which he
leaned, whilst Valdor, forgetting all that he knew,
and all that rumour said of the heartlessness and
callousness of the man to whom he pleaded, poured
out his rapid words, while his voice grew mellow
and his eyes dimmed with the earnestness of what he
felt.
" Will you, Strathmore ? " he repeated again. " I
do not ask it for my own sake alone, but if she
should love me one doubt is a woman's curse, and
that soft, delicate, lofty nature will never love but
once."
Strathmore stood silent, still, his face in shadow
under the drooped palm-leaves, his eyes looking down
into the water where the lotus-lilies she had toyed
with floated lazily ; none could have told what might
be passing in him ; his thought was deep, but none
could have said it was painful. After some mo-
ments, he lifted his head, and his voice was clear and
serene :
"Before giving you my promise, you must give
me yours to one thing your love for Lucille is
genuine ? "
" It is, so help me God ! "
" Sufficiently so to concede what I should exact in
the event of your becoming her husband (I speak to
you now, of course, not as your friend, but as one
who fills her father's office), namely, that you would
relinquish and give me your word never to rejoin
political risks and intrigues ? I could not consent to
ITNDEK THE AISLE OF THE PALMS. 21
place her peace in the hands of one who would un-
avoidably jeopardy it by hazarding his own safety
for a Patriot is but a Conspirator if he fail. You
would do this?"
Yaldor hesitated a moment ; his political creed was
portion of his very blood and life, and the ardent
Henri Cinquiste revolted from condemning himself to
the inaction from which he could not rouse his party;
but the stronger ardour of a new-born passion pre-
vailed at last ; he bent his head :
" I wouldj I swear to you. And now, Strathmore,
may I seek your word, that you will guard my hope
from being destroyed during my absence, and will
say to her of my love all I would myself have said to-
night!"
" Yes, I will do so."
His voice was tranquil and passionless ; it had no
inflexion of reluctance, but equally none of willing-
ness or friendship ; it was sim2:)ly the assent of a man
who undertakes a duty, but it also bore with it the
unmistakable assurance of an honour which will un-
failingly execute its word once pledged. And that
assurance Valdor recognised ; he stretched out his
hand, a grateful light gleaming in his eyes, with un-
wonted emotion :
" Thank you from my soul ! You have relieved
me of all fear, for I know, Strathmore, that though
those who trust to your mercy may be in danger, those
who trust to your honour are safe. In a brief while
I shall return to claim Lucille at your hands."
22 STEATHMOEE.
He spoke in tlie thoughtless candour, the trans-
parent warmth, of liis own heart ; the shadow which
fell across his listener's face from the swaying palm-
trees above hid from him the light which, for a second,
leapt to Strathmore's eyes, like the sudden flash of
steel in the gloom. But Strathmore gave him his
hand, and bade him good speed and without falsity.
He would be no traitor; he would keep true faith
with this man, since it was this man whom Lucille
loved.
As Yaldor left the conservatories, he saw a spray
of lilies of the valley fallen from Lucille's dress, na-
tural flowers preserved by some peculiar art ; he re-
cognised them, and, stooping, took them up ; for this
new love of the French noble had something of the
knightly reverence of old. He put the flowers in his
breast, and went out into tlie night; his heart was
heavy with the pain of enforced absence, but it was
warm with hope and with the firm belief of love re-
turned, belief he would never have so cherished but
for the testimony of Strathmore a testimony he felt
instinctively was sincere because unwilling ; and he
thought of her tenderly, longingly, trustfully, while
he looked back at the grey, stately, melancholy pile
of White Ladies.
He whom he had quitted, pledged to fulfil the oflice
trusted to his honour, stood for awhile motionless beside
the lotus-fountain, his hand clenched hard on its
marble rim. An evil of which he had never dreamed
UNDER THE AISLE OF THE PALMS. 23
uncurled about him up from tlie poisoned aslies of
dead years ; a contest which he had never foreseen
nor feared was before him through which to wrestle ;
and he was no coward, no traitor. He could not
shrink from that which lay before him, he could not
sacrifice the life he had sworn at all cost to preserve
joyous, and knowing not pain, only to secure to him-
self a selfish and barren desire the brute desire of
the man who, banned from a treasure, destroys it,
rather than let it drift, blessing and blessed, into the
lives of others.
For awhile he stood motionless there, with his hand
pressed on the marble where the young girl's brow
had lain ; then, with swift uneven steps at first, later
on with a harder, firmer tread, as though treading
down the accursed shapes which rose about him to
torture and to tempt, he walked to and fro the path-
way bordered and shaded with the palms. This man
^whom his associates deemed callous to all pain, as
the bronze to which they likened him, and who in his
arrogance had held that life was a thing to be moulded
at will, defiant of deity or man, of death or circum
stance suffered a fearful doom, such an one as purer
souls or gentler natures never know.
Once, as he paced there in the midnight soli-
tude, he looked up at the drooping and curled leaves
of the palms above, and a bitter smile came on his
lips.
" The emblems that fools choose of Peace, they are
24 STEATHMOKE.
fitting in my house ! Peace ! peace ! there is none !
Oh, God, is there peace in the grave? or does
science, that knows we rot, he as well as nescience
that babbles of our resurrection? Is there peace
there dull, dreamless peace or in death must we
even remember !^^
And in the heart-sick mockery there was a misery-
greater than lies in grief.
25
CHAPTEK II.
CAN OBLIVION BE BOUGHT?
Strathmore had an accepted duty to perform,
and from what he had once set before himself he
never shrank nor paused. With as Httle mercy as
he drove the steel into the souls of others, he drove
it into his own when occasion arose ; self-love and
self-reliance were dominant in him, but self-pity he
disdained, as the weakness of the coward. It was for
Lucille' s sake that he had given the pledge extracted
from him the night before ; it was for Lucille's sake
that he prepared to fulfil it rigidly and to the utter-
most letter, not grudgingly, nor with constraint more-
over, but with a complete and unfaltering justice to
the man who had trusted him.
And on the morrow he was braced to his ordeal.
He was victorious, and ready to carry through what
he had appointed to himself ; what he had once elected
26 STKATHMOEE.
to do he was strong to do, whether it were to hiflict
or to endure.
It was noon, and the windows of his private library
stood open to a shady and secluded part of the
gardens, with the Western sea beyond the deer
forests.
He sat alone, writing the history entrusted to him ;
delicacy to her, not distrust to himself, prompting him
to relate it thus, for Strathmore, " weaker in many
things, stronger in a few," having once selected that
which he had to do, was of the stuff to thrust his
arm into the flame unblenching, and hold it there till
it had consumed without a sign of pain.
So he wrote wrote the truth in every iota of what
had passed between him and the man who loved her.
A calm letter, leaving no doubt unjust to the absent,
withholding no expression which could assure her she
was beloved by him, speaking of him as he deserved?
as one not faultless without doubt, but as a generous
and chivalrous gentleman, finally leaving her free to
be happy in his love if she would, with such kind and
thoughtful words of personal tenderness for her own
peace as became his position towards her such as
her father, had he lived, might have penned to her
on the turning-point of her young life. The writing
had the firm and delicate clearness of his habitual
hand ; the words were gentle to her, and just in the
uttermost to the absent ; the style was courtly, lucid,
terse ; there was not a trace that its composition had
cost him anything, or that any feeling moved him
CAN OBLIVION BE BOUGHT ? 27
save solicitude for her welfare and her future. Yet,
when it was done, the dew stood upon his forehead
as on the brow of a man who has passed through
some great peril, and his head sank down till it
rested on the writing-table he felt as though the
curse of his past were rising around him with its
sensual murderous vapour, and stifling his life like
poisonous fumes.
" It is just it is just," he muttered, " that I should
surrender her to the one who was with me when I
slew him ! Retribution is there retribution ? Only
for cravens and fools ! Do I grow a coward as well
as a traitor?"
He flung the letter from him, and rose and went
to the open casement, where the fresh west wind of
the morning was blowing among the thick ivy which
clung to the mullions. He wanted to shake from him
what had newly assailed him. Strathmore was of
the world, and one amongst its rulers ; his deity was
power, the essence of his life dominance, and that
which weakened or undermined his strength he would
have cut out by the roots and torn from him, no
matter at what cost. Anguish might fasten on his
solitary hours, remorse might seize the brief watches
of the night, but it was unknown by men. As the Iron
Cardinal wore the shirt of penance under the velvets
and furs of his pontifical robes, and had the coarse
pallet laid unseen under his sumptuous bed, so
Strathmore kept his sin unforgotten, to torment him
as it would, but never let it be seen of the world, or
28 STEATHMORE.
strike his ambition from his pubhc life, and from his
future hold. Like Ximenes he scourged himself, but
he ruled others.
As he stood there he saw Lucille. She was feed-
ing one of the pet fawns with rose-leaves, only a few
yards from him ; and in the fall of the lashes over
the eyes, the smile upon the lips, the whole attitude
with which her head drooped, and she held the
leaves to the little animal, there was something of
weariness and dejection. Possibly, he thought, she
had heard of Valdor's departure, though as yet, thus
early in the day, it had not become generally known
among the numerous guests at White Ladies.
Turning, she saw him, and the rose-leaves fell from
her hand; she came to him with the gladness and
grace of her habitual greeting, fleet as the fawn
which followed her, ringing its silver bells ; but the
flush, which he had seen for the first time by the
lotus-fountain, came on her face, her steps lingered
more slowly as she drew nearer to him, and she did
not lift her face for the caress which she was used to
receive as a child receives her father's. The new love
had already stolen her from him; the shadow of
estrangement had already fallen between them.
" Have you anything you wish to say to me,
Lucille ? " he asked, gently, as he advanced to meet
her with the graceful courtesy habitual to him to all
women, but which to her alone was not unreal. He
asked the question with some anxiety, some hope;
CAN OBLIVION BE BOUGHT ? 29
he would fain have kept, at least, her free and fear-
less confidence, it was difficult to him to believe that
she had so soon learned to treasure thoughts too dear
him to share.
She lifted her eyes with something of wonder
mingled with their shyness.
" No nothing."
He dropped her hand, and was silent a moment,
while she stood beside him stroking the lifted head of
the fawn.
" Do not think that I wish to force your confidence,
my dear," he went on, gently still, " but I should be
glad of a few minutes alone with you. Will you
come into the library now ? "
He held open the glass door for her to pass
through ; but she shrank back, something of the
startled fear with which she had fled from him the
night just passed came on her face again.
" You wish me ? now ? "
The reluctance stung him to the soul.
" Certainly not, if you be unwilling. It is no
matter."
Strathmore re-entered the library saying no more ;
he let no living creature disobey him, but to her he
would not use coercion, not even command, and he
left her, lest she who knew not the blow she dealt
should wring from him one stern or bitter word.
From such she was as sacred to him as are the dead
to the living : he would no more have raised his
30 STEATHMOEE.
voice harshly to her than we would raise our hand to
strike some hallowed and beloved face that lies within
its coffin.
As he took up his letter, and sealed and addressed
it, standing with his back to the windows, he did not
hear her follow him, he did not see her at his side,
till he felt her lips touch his hand, and started at the
caress to meet her eyes raised wistful and pleading to
his own.
" Lord Cecil, did I displease you 1 Are you angry
with me V
^^ I could not know anger to you, Lucille."
" But you looked coldly at me your words are not
like your ovv^n. Are you sure I have not vexed you ?"
He stooped to her ; and the clear, inflexible voice,
which never softened for mercy, nor faltered for
pain, nor altered in welcome or invective, in courtesy
or in mockery, but was ever tranquil and icy alike to
friend or foe, quivered slightly as he did so :
" Lucille, once for all believe me ; you can only
pain me if I see you pained ; you will most truly
obey me, most truly rejoice me, by showing me that
your heart has not an ungratified wish, nor your life
a single sorrow. There is a letter lying there I wish
you to read : do not hasten to answer it, to-morrow
will be ample time for that to-morrow at this hour."
His lips touched her cheek in his usual farewell,
and he quitted the library.
She sank into his chair, and her head drooped, as
CAN OBLIVION BE BOUGHT ? 31
the sunlight, slanting in through the ivy leaves, fell
on her brow, while her lips were slightly parted in
dreaming thought ; not wholly the childlike thought,
poetic but unshadowed, with which she had gazed
over the seas at Silver-rest, more restless, more vague,
more troubled at itself.
" How good he is ! so great, so powerful, so
famous, yet so untiring for me," she whispered,
below her breath. " Pain him ? Oh, how could any
ever pain him, or disobey his lightest word? That
guilty woman, who forsook him in the past, how
could she ever betray such a heart as his ? Perhaps
her memory is bitter to him still; perhaps he has
never loved another as he loved her ! "
And the burden of those long-buried years, of that
veiled past, she did not know, already cast its first
faint shadow over Lucille, where she sat with her
head bowed, and her eyes unconsciously tracing the
path across the skies, of an autumn flight of swallows,
winging their way to cross the golden land where her
father's grave was laid, and the pine-covered moun-
tains of her mother's Hungarian home, on towards
Syrian air and Cashmere citron-groves.
Some moments had passed when she remembered
the letter he had bade her read ; she took it up with-
out ir^terest till she recognised his writing, then she
opened it in eagerness, all that her guardian did or
said was sacred to her. She would have disbelieved
the witness of the universe if it had bid her see a
32 STRATHMORE.
stain upon the character whose very indifference to
others only served to make her feel the more his con-
stant gentleness to herself.
She opened his letter with eagerness; but as she
read, the colour left her cheeks, a look of wondering
pain came into her eyes, and at its close her face lost
all its warmth and light; she pushed back the hair
from her brow with a movement of startled disquiet,
and her lips trembled. She sat silent, gazing down
on the clear writing and dispassionate words ; she was
very young, and the love proffered to and pressed on
her had little other effect upon her than that of
wonder and something of repulsion, she had no need
of it, no wish for it, and it had almost a terror for
her. Phrases in this letter, moreover those very
phrases which most expressed solicitude for her
welfare, and did most justice to Yaldor's claims and
story smote her with a deeper pain. She felt for
the solitary time in her bright, brief life, wounded,
stricken, left alone.
" Is he weary of me, that it would give him plea-
sure to exile me to another life ? "
It was this thought which made the mist gather
between her eyes, and the wheeling flight of the
swallows in the sun ; this thought which brought
over her face a look which it had never worn in
her sunny life a look of that pain from which
Strathmore, for the sake of the dead, had set his will
to guard her, as though he held the making and the
marring, the warp and the woof, of that tangled web
CAN OBLIVION BE BOUGHT ? 33
of Fate which is woven by hazard in the shadow of a
dark uncertainty, and is not to be coloured or riven
by the art or the strength of man.
" Lucille ! what is it that has grieved you ? "
She started, and looked up in the sunlight. Before
her stood young Caryll, whom she had sent for rose-
leaves for the fawn ; the boy's face was troubled at
the shadow upon hers, and his frank eyes shone with
the love he was forbade to speak, and in which she,
used to tenderness from her youngest years from
all, and specially from him, never dreamt of danger.
" All things loved her," as she had once said in her
early infancy ; and of another love than this affection
which had always surrounded her, of the passion
which her beauty awakened, or of the misery which
it might cause, Lucille was utterly unconscious. Her
life and her education had been such as to leave her,
far longer than most, the guilelessness and purity of
her childhood. It would be long ere the world could
teach such a mind, grosser taint or darker knowledge ;
it would shake off the evil lessons as a bird's wing
shakes the night dews.
" What has grieved you, Lucille ? " the young man
repeated, as he knelt before her.
" Nothing ; at least I do not know," she answered,
slowly, while she pushed the hair from her temples
with a certain heat and weariness.
" Something has," he persisted. " Perhaps my
uncle "
VOL. in. D
34 STEATHMOEE.
Her face was flushed witli light in an instant, and
her eyes turned on him with rebuke :
" Nello ! for shame hush ! When was Lord
Cecil ever otherwise than generous and gentle and
kind for me ? "
The youth set his teeth hard; with the keen in-
sight of jealous love, he feared none of his brilliant
rivals who circled about her, free to whisper what
they would, while his own lips were sealed to silence,
as he feared this graceful and loyal devotion to the
man whose years were double his, who stood in her
father's place, and whose cold, world-worn, inflexible
character looked to Lionel Caryll one which no feel-
ing had ever touched, nor weakness ever smitten.
" Oh, Lucille, Lucille ! " he said, with bitterness,
for it was a cruel ordeal to chain down his words to
go no further than his honour had pledged, " have a
few weeks changed you so, that you have forgotten
all the years from your infancy, and will not even
share what grieves you with one whom you used at
least to trust and love as a brother?"
She looked down on him surprised and regretful ;
the change was not that she gave less, but that he
longed for more, and she wondered, self-reproach-
ingly, how she had wounded him.
" Dear Nello, you are my brother, and I am not
altered not altered in one shadow! I could never
change to those I love."
" And I am among them ? "
His voice trembled, his heart beat loud; it was
i
CAN OBLIVION BE BOUGHT ? 35
difficult not to pray with all his soul and strength for
one love greater than all the rest, but it was much to
keep his hold on the silver cord of her child-memories.
Her hand strayed among the waves of his hair, while
the eyes that were clear with the single-hearted loyalty
of youth gazed up into her own, and the swift sunlit
smile that was her heritage from her father lighted
her face ; it seemed to her so absurd that he could
doubt she loved him, her playmate, her favourite, her
brother !
" Nello ! it is you who are changed ! You never
asked those foolish, useless questions at Silver-rest I
You know I love you dearly, very dearly. None will
ever love you better than Lucille."
She spoke with the consoling, caressing affection
of a loving child to one whom she fears, while she
wonders how, she may have wounded, and the young
man's frank, tell-tale face gleamed with the light of
hope and youth ; the love of his years, if reverential
and poetic, has much of the element of worship, and
is quickly gladdened by a little, unlike the fierce,
imperious, egotistic passion which, if it have not all,
has nothing. He thanked her with joyous, tender
words, which he found hard to rein in to the limits
of his promise, and led her out into the sunlight.
" I see nothing of you, Lucille, here," he pleaded.
" Give me this morning alone, as though we were at
Silver-rest."
She hesitated a moment, listening; it was to the
roll of carriages taking Strathmore and several of the
d2
36 STEATHMOKE.
men to a meeting twenty miles away, wliicli, as Lord-
Lieutenant of the county, lie liad promised to head.
Then she went with Gary 11 where he liked, her guar-
dian's letter lying on her heart, and lying she knew
not why with a dull pain there.
The park was very beautiful in the autumn noon?
with surge and beach, cloud and sunshine, golden
woods and winding waters, all molten together in the
amber light, and they wandered where chance led
them. To her, to whom the brown chesnuts in her
path, the sweep of a flight of deer, the glance of the
ocean through an avenue of forest-trees were poems,
all life, all nature were full of beauty ; and he had
no world but in her face, and knew no music but
her voice.
They came at last to the small, grey, mediaeval
clim'ch of White Ladies, ancient as the Abbey, with
dim storied windows, and Gothic walls all wreathed
and darkened with ivy scarce less old. It stood shut
in with foliage, and singularly still and peaceful, with
the sheen of the sea gleaming below through its trees,
and the lulling of the waves making solemn melan-
choly requiem over the buried dead.
" Hush ! it is so beautiful !" she wdiispered to him,
as if the sound of his voice jarred on her in breaking
the silence, while her face reflected the tender and
holy memories of the place, as it reflected all such
things but too deeply. " Listen ! the sea itself mur-
murs softly and low, as though it were afraid to
wake them. It is not death liere, in the stillness,
CAN OBLIVION BE BOUGHT ? 37
in the sunlight, under those shady leaves it is only
sleep!"
He was silent, gazing on her as her eyes filled with
a reverent tenderness and a softened light, as they
looked far and wistfully, beyond the beauty round her,
into those sublime and mournful mysteries of life and
death, in which the poetic spiritual mind had wan-
dered away where his could not follow.
'^ I love the German name, God's Acre," she said,
softly, after long silence. " It seems to say that while
the world is only busy with the living, and so soon
forgets its best when they are gone. He loves, and has
garnered, the lost."
" Do not speak of those things, Lucille ; death
seems too brutal a thing to remember with youP
The youth felt, as all felt in her presence, some-
thing more tender than awe, more vague than fear,
as looking upon a flower whose brilliance is too de-
licate and fragile to bloom long on earth, a sunshine
too shadowless and too pure to be long lent of heaven.
She smiled a little dreamily, and her hands Avandered
among the long waving grasses and coils of ivy,
putting them tenderly aside from the nearest grave,
whose single grey stone they had overgrown in their
luxuriance; and, as she did so, she traced the moss-
veiled letters of the inscription, which was but one
word only
Hucille.
She gave a low, startled cry :
38 STEATHMOEE.
" Oh, Nello ! look it is mj name."
Young Caryll bent over her, startled also more
than so slight a coincidence warranted ; it gave him
an emotion of pain to see the name he loved graven
on a tomb, and in the sequestered village church-
yard, where none but the peasantry had been buried
century after century, save where the lofty mauso-
leums of the great race of White Ladies rose, it
seemed one strange and foreign to find there.
" Yours ! Whose can it be ? There is no date,"
he said, as he swept the grasses farther off the low
headstone.
" No ! Perhaps she died young, and they laid her
here with only the name by which they had loved
her ; and it told all to them, though nothing to us.
Ah ! death is cruel, desolate, sorrowful ! The sun is
warm, the sea is calm, the birds are singing, and she
lies there alone!"
Her voice was hushed, and her eyes were filled
with a sad and tender light, as she wound the foliage
reverently about the tomb, leaving clear the name
that was her own, the name which touched her
strangely, found on this unkno^vn and lonely grave,
which she knew not as the grave of her mother.
Her temperament was vividly susceptible and deeply
tinged with the reflective sadness which usually
marks imaginative natures, and Lucille, to whom,
personally, sorrow was but a name, felt for all things
that suffered, for all who were lonely and in pain,
with a divine and yearning pity. Life in her hands
CAN OBLIVION BE BOUGHT ? 3"9
was a beautiful wonder-flower, just unclosing without
a soil on its white virginal leaves, and the richest gold
in its calix still hidden like the amber stamen of the
half-opened lily. It seemed so cruel to her that there
should be any for whom that beautiful flower was
bruised and broken, and left colourless and crushed,
and without fragi-ance, to be flung at the last into the
darkened solitude of a closed grave !
And she sat silent, her hand still wandering over
the foliage that covered the carved letters of her own
name, while at her feet the wide blue sea lay shining
in the light, and the honest, tender eyes of' Lionel
Caryll gazed upward to the face which he had loved
from childhood. But her thoughts were not with him
as she looked far away through the shady leaves of
the church elms over the sunny waters : they were
with the unknown life which lay buried and lonely
beneath the moss, and with the words of the letter,
which rested on her heart with a vague and heavy
pain.
Strathmore returned late. He came and addressed
a few courtly, gentle words to her, according to his
custom, but he did not even with a look seek to learn
the effect wdiich Yaldor's love had had upon her as
he approached her.
" This day has been like an Indian summer ! How
have you spent it, my dear ? "
He noted that her cheeks flushed and her eyes
drooped at his presence.
40 . STRATHMOEE.
" In the park with Nello. The air was so lovely !
And Oh, Lord Cecil ! " her face was raised now,
and her eyes full of wistful inquiry " there is a grave
here, in White Ladies, with my name, ' Lucille/ on
the stone only that ! Whose was it ? Do you
know?"
" Your name ? Had it any date ? "
" No ; nothing but the one word."
He smiled a little ; and even his mother, who knew
the history of that grave, could not see any look on
his face save some slight amusement with the marvel
of youth at the ordinary trifles it meets.
"Were you abroad, Lucille, you would see your
name on many graves, though it is an uncommon one
here. Several French refugees came to White Ladies,
I know, in '89 ; possibly it belonged to one of them.
The stone bore no date, you say ? Now, your wan-
dering fancy can dream a mournful story of exile and
of severance, and weave an idyl from that single
word!"
Those around them laughed ; she smiled ; the ex-
planation she never doubted, yet the remembrance of
that lonely grave lying beneath the waving grasses
and the ivy coils, with its incessant requiem chanted
by the melancholy seas, saddened her still ; and Nello
Caryll, as he listened, felt vaguely and causelessly,
that in some way or other that nameless tomb under
the shadow of the old monastic church was one of the
links which bound Strathmore to the young girl,
Lucille.
CAN OBLIVION BE BOUGHT ? 41
The da}' had been like an Indian summer, but its
warmth and serenity had been treacherous. It had
become very chilly as the evening drew near; the
"wild white horses" of the sea dashed in, flinging
high their snowy foam ; dark, ominous clouds drifted
before the wind as the sun went down ; and the
fisher-people farther down the coast looked up and
saw the sure heralds of the coming storm, as the grey
o;ulls and curlews flew with a shrill scream over the
angry waters.
In the same hour while tlie tempest was rising to
break over the ocean and the beach, the forests and
the hills, of White Ladies, a steamer was ploughing
its swift way across the Channel, running fast before
the gale to reach the French coast ere the night and
the storm were down ; and Valdor leant against the
side of the vessel with the little delicate lilies of the
valley close against his heart. He was on a perilous
mission ; his name had become suspected, all but pro-
scribed, by the existing government, a trifle made
known of his present errand, and he might be "de-
tained," or worse : and yet his thoughts were bright and
trustful ones, for the chiA^alrous nature of the Legiti-
mist Noble knew nothing of the craven hesitance of
fear, and ^he loved and he thought himself loved.
" A rough night coming on, but we shall be in
port in half an hour," said a voice beside him.
Valdor started from his reverie with a courteous
^^ Plait a, monsieur;''' and as he raised his head saw a
tall, bronzed, soldierly man, whose face seemed to
42 STRATHMOKE.
liim familiar. The recognition was mutual, thougli
indefinite, on both sides.
" Pardon me, but we surely have met before, though
I cannot recal your name," said the Englishman. " I
am Colonel Marchmont, Queen's Bays ^"
" Whom I think I had the honour of knowing very
well in Paris years ago ; is it not so ? " said Valdor, as
he gave his own name, and acknowledged the^acquaint-
ance. " Surely the last time I had the pleasure of see-
ing you we acted together in an affair of honour ? "
" Ah ! ages ago," said Marchmont. " To be sure, I
remember now ; a shocking affair, when that incar-
nate brute, Strathmore, killed poor Erroll. I beg your
pardon for calling him so ; no doubt he is a friend of
yours still."
" A very valued one."
'' Then I offer you many apologies, but the words
slipped out," said the soldier, puffing Havannah smoke
from under his long grey moustaches. " I have killed
off plenty of men myself in the field, but there w^^s
something I didn't like in that affair ; it was cold and
deadly ; one saw he ' meant murder' by his eye.
They'd lived like brothers, and he shot him like a
dog, and felt as little remorse afterwards ! I dare say
Strathmore' s forgot the whole matter, hasn't he ? "
" I have never heard him allude to it, nor any one
else, for many years."
" No doubt. The world soon forgets, especially
what its great men like to have forgotten. He is a
w^onderf ully successful statesman ; his politics are not
mine, but there is no denying his power."
CAN OBLIVION BE BOUGHT ? 43
" He is tlie most able man of your country ; he
was always ^plus fin que tons les autres' in diplo-
macy," answered Valdor, as liis hand wandered in the
breast of his coat, where the fragrant lilies were
hidden; "but you wrong him if you imagine him
brutal. Cold he is, and when he is aroused, perhaps
dangerous, still he has generous, and, indeed, great
qualities. But you were intimate friends with Erroll,
perhaps ? "
" Poor fellow, yes ! We were in the same corps."
" Do you know if he had any relatives ? " Valdor's
hand was on the lily-sprays, and a vague instinct con-
nected in his thoughts the memory of Lucille with
the memory of the dead man.
" None, I think, except old Sir Arthur, and some
cousin or other, who had the baronetcy."
" There was no one to mourn him, then ? "
" Nobody, except all who knew him ! He left me
a letter for Strathmore, and one for a woman in Eng-
land, if I remember right ; that was all."
" A woman ! Who was she ? "
His hand was on the flowers, and he felt a sudden,
keen, breathless impatience, as though it were closing
on the thread of the mystery which he had always felt
encirled the life he loved, and connected her with him
whom the world saw as her guardian.
" Haven't an idea," answered the Englishman.
" Some lady-love or other, I suppose."
" Do you remember her name, monsieur ? "
"No, it is so many years ago. I fancy it was
something foreign ; but I recollect he addressed his
44 STEATHMORE.
letter to her at White Ladies. I remember that,
because it was Strathmore's place, and poor Bertie
was often down there."
" Would you know the name if you heard it ? "
" I might."
"WasitDe Vocqsal?"
Marchmont thouo^ht a moment.
" Eh ? I don't know. I think it was. Yes, I am
almost sure. Why ? "
" Only because I had a fancy of my own about a
story of his past, and I was curious to know if I were
right. How the wind is rising; but there are the
Boulogne lights. Are you going to Paris ? "
" Yes, but only en route for a little farther ; to
India, for the next ten years, perhaps, if those moun-
tain robbers go on worrying us," answered the sol-
dier, too careless and too indifferent to the matter to
wonder why Valdor had any interest in the' past
history of his long dead friend. Soon afterwards he
was called to the cabin, where his wife, but lately
wedded, had taken refuge, and Valdor was left alone,
leaning on the rail of the ship, while his eyes watched
the phosphor light flashing on the crested waves, and
his hand held the lilies of the valley as though hold-
ing the pledge of a fair future in those delicate,
withered sprays.
His pulses beat quicker he had learned Strath-
more's secret ! That which every forethought had
environed, every care veiled, every prudence and
expedient concealed beyond reach of sight; that
CAN OBLIVION BE BOUGHT ? 45
which had been buried for ever in the graves of the
dead, in a sepulchre whose seal no human hand was
to break, lest the poisoned miasma should escape to
touch with its taint the young and innocent, had
come into his power. Dark, uncertain, shadowy as
the past still was, he knew enough to know what was
the link which fettered Strathmore to the framle
tenure of a dawning life, in so strange an union ;
Avhat was the knotted cord of expiation worn beneath
the chain armour, and the broidered velvet, of public
ambition, and of worldly fame, by the man whom the
world deemed remorse never smote. He had un-
earthed Strathmore' s secret, and he forgot how pitiless
to those who braved him, how unscrupulous where
his passions wree roused, or his will was opposed,
how intolerant alike of those who stood in his path,
or trenched on his power, was one whom nature had
made inflexible, whom a woman had made cruel,
and whom tlie world had made merciless. He only
felt:
" 1 will never tell her ; his remorse is sacred, his
secret shall be safe with me."
And the French Noble thought with a generous
pity, a noble faith, of the man whose atonement he
had learnt, as in the shadow of the night he lifted
the frail fragrant lilies of the valley to his lips, and
kissed them reverently, like some hallowed relic, as
he leaned over the dark angry waters while the vessel
bore her Avay to France.
46
CHAPTER III.
"morituri te salutant!"
It was near midniglit; the fires were warm and
the lights bright in the cedar di'awing-room at White
Ladies, flashing on the silver and azure panellings,
the countless trifles of art and luxury, the clusters of
exotics, and the delicate hues of the women's jewels
and dresses. Some were playing chess or ecarte,
some softly flirting, some talking of sport and some of
slander, while the clear contralto of Lady Chessville
echoed from the music-room beyond, where she and
her idolaters were singing the music of "Figaro,"
which they would perform on the morrow in the pri-
vate theatre.
' Within, it was brilliant, still, peaceful, with no
sound higher than the murmur of voices attuned
to one soft, languid key, which never varied in pain
or in pleasure, in repartee, flattery, or spleen. With-
out, the mnds were rising shrill and high among the
" MOEITUEI TE SALUTANT !" 47
old monastic woods, and the lightning was swirling
about the fretted pinnacles of the Abbey, and in the
lull of the music the hollow, angry roar of the seas,
answering the challenge of the storm, pealed through
the silence. It was a rough night on the coast.
" Bad night out," said the Earl of Fernneley, with
a suppressed yawn, as a blaze of lightning flashed
through the length of the drawing-rooms, outdazzling
the wax-lights.
" Plenty of casualties," suggested Sir Philip
D'Orvai.
" All the better for wreckers, they thank Heaven
for foul weather ! " said a pretty woman, castling her
adversary's queen, and nestling herself in her causeuse
to await his next move.
" Wreckers ! You touch our esprit du corps. Lady
Adela. We are all Ministerialists here," said Johnnie
Vaux, a whip and a wit.
A languid but general laugh gave him the answer
that flattered him most, as a minute gun was flred,
faintly heard in the pauses of the thunder, but not
stopping the cards, the chess, or the flirtations.
" Many lives lost off your coast in the year. Strath-
more ? " asked the Prince de Yolms.
" Scores, I believe," answered Strathmore, with
negligent indifference, as he pursued his e carte with
D'Orvai.
" Pray don't talk about it, then ; it is terrible ! "
cried a Spanish beauty, with a shiver of her fan, draw-
ing her perfumed lace about her.
48 STEATHMOBE.
Strathmore laughed liis slight, gentle laugh :
" Je lien vois pas la terreur, madame ! Men must
die, it doesn't much matter lioiv. If casualties, epi-
demics, and wars didn't take off our surplus popula-
tion at intervals, we should soon be overrun. Nothing
is more superfluous than those romantic laments for
most convenient laws of nature ! I mark the king,
D'Orvai."
Another signal of distress broke on the ear, muffled
by the moaning winds, as he turned to pursue his
game. With the proficiency of old, he brought the
same skill and the same rules to cards as to the
Cabinet, and won in both.
He had been perfectly sincere in what he had just
said. His political economy taught him its truth.
He had a profound indifference for mankind ; loss of
life did not concern him; with a cold, but correct,
philosophy, he held that a thousand people killed by
an accident, a battle, or an endemic, mattered no
more in the aggregate, and was, therefore, as in-
different to men of sense, as the butchery of a thou-
sand sheep in the shambles.
As he looked up to deal the last game he glanced
across the room, and saw the gaze of Lucille fixed on
him. Her eyes watched him under their long lashes
with something of wonder, of reproach, of sorrow,
mingled with their earnest and reverent tenderness ;
to her he never spoke such words, to her this side of
his character was never shown, and at its pitilessness
her heart which loved every living thing down to the
"moeituei te salutant 1" 49
lowliest flower, and grieved for the broken wing of a
bird, felt a shuddering incredulity and pain : death
would have been sweeter, and more mercy to her,
than to have found an error or a stain in him. And
that gaze, as he met it, was so like that which had
dw^elt on him in compassionate pardon, in mute re-
proach, while the sun sank down upon his .wrath, that
the life his hand had taken smote his conscience with
the sudden memory of irrevocable crime.
He played the game out played, and won with
unchanged science and skill, or he had not been
Strathmore; then, crossing the drawing-rooms, he
approached her.
" You look sad, Lucille. Are you afraid of the
storm?"
She sat a little apart, no one was near at the mo-
ment, and she lifted her eyes to his as his hand lay
on her shoulder :
" Afraid ? Oh no ! I was thinking of the people
out at sea, and of their misery. You only said that
in jest ; you would save them, I know, if you could ?
It is so terrible to sit in light and gaiety and comfort
while the ships are perishing ? it seems like guilt to
be careless and rejoicing while others suffer, and
death is close at hand ? There is something so fearful
in life taken ! "
His hand dropped from her shoulder the hand
which had "taken life" and, stricken by those
words, he went out away from the light, the murmur,
VOL. III. E
50 STEATHMOEE. i
the music; out into the solitude of tlie dark and ;
stormy night. i
No rain was falling, and the night was still, save \
when the winds, sweeping up through the forests, i
shrieked and moaned upon the air, and the noise of i
the waves arose with a hollow roar, like desert beasts i
seeking their prey. The ringed lightning, whirling ;
down the sky, lit up the black masses of woodland '
and the ruins of the cloisters where the graves of '
the dead Dominicans lay ; and at intervals, above the !
tumult of the wind and sea, the signal of distress i
broke faintly, and then died away. j
He stood on the terrace, looking seaward, his head |
uncovered, his eyes meeting the blaze that was laden \
with death or blindness, braving the fury of the j
storm as he had braved the curse of God and Man. i
Its wild work rioted unnoticed, unf elt, around him ; j
one of those dark hours was upon him of which the \
world never knew, when the pride of an arrogant and I
egotistic philosophy was rent asunder, and the throes j
of an undying remorse possessed the soul which knew |
itself but the more deeply damned because the lofti- \
ness of intellect by which it was companioned left it j
no plea of the dullard's brute ignorance, or the mur- \
derer's coarse apathy, in its crime. He had wrought ]
his guilt wittingly, deliberately, and, though trodden j
down from memory by an iron heel, and forgotten \
through long stretches of time in the pursuit of 'I
power, in these hours rare, solitary, horrible as those \
hours in which the men of earlier ages, passion-riven, j
" MORITURI TE SALUTANT 1" 51
deemed themselves fiend-possessed it rose from the
coiled and slumbering past, and twisted round him as
the serpents round the Laocoon.
Rcire, but the more terrible for their rarity, these
hours came upon him. He lived again through the
commission of his crime ; he heard the sullen splashing
of the pestilential waters; he saw on his right hand
the luminous glory of the sun ; he watched the last-
drawn breath shiver through the dying limbs, while
the white and quivering lips gasped their last words
of pardon : " I forgive I forgive ! he did not
know " Pardon even in the throes of death!
And the love that he had borne him, the love of
youth's rejoicing brotherhood, uprose before him in
all its glad communion, and the very earth beneath,
the very air about him, seemed to call for vengeance
for that guiltless life hurled into a brutal grave !
Arrogant to the living, before the memory of his
sin he bowed, prostrate, stricken, accursed in his
own sight. For his work was irrevocable : and in
its despaii', its fruitless yearning, its hopeless impo-
tence, remorse looked mockery, expiation blasphemy.
What is done, is done for all eternity.
He stood looking seaward, while the thunder echoed
from hill to hill, and the roar of the deep rose hoarse
and sullen to its call, and as the wild winds lashed
and moaned about him, his eyes looked up, and met
the lightning unquailing. The great lost soul of
this man, which knew a supreme remorse, but was
never smitten with a craven's fear, found the echo of
e2
52 STEATHMOEE.
its own agony in the throes of earth and heaven, and
from his lips broke a bitter cry, lost in the beating of
the storm :
" Oh God ! release me from my guilt ! "
In the silence, as the tempest lulled and the winds
sank to rise again in deadlier wrath, there echoed
from the ocean raging below, the piteous signal, and
the prayer for human aid, of men in their last ex-
tremity, perishing nigh at hand. He heard it, stand-
ing there, looking down into the darkness with his
face towards the sea ; and as from the night around
him there arose that faint and weary moan of mortal
misery, his conscience whispered, " Let the hand which
took life save it. So may its sin be redeemed ! "
Then as men obey an imperative command, he
bowed his head and went through the tumult of the
storm down towards the sea.
In the dark-arched portal of the door leading from
the western wing, gazing at him with the loyalty
of her innocent love, while the wind drowned and
wafted from her ear the cry to God of her father's
destroyer, stood Lucille. Unseen and inspired by
that instinct which lends courao-e to the weak and
strength to the frail, she had followed him through
passage and corridor to the silent and deserted western
wing of the Abbey. The bright and delicate figure
was strangely framed in the grey stone of the pointed
archway ; her eyes looked wistfully out into the weird
darkness of the night; her hair gleamed golden in
the flame which played about it ; fragile, imaginative.
"MOEITUKI TE SALUTANT !" 53
impressible, fearful in much, the storm had no terror
for her, its grandeur had been the music which had
filled her heart with its own solemnity in earliest
childhood, and to which she had loved to listen as to
the sublime rhythm of a Miltonic poem. Moreover
into danger or death she would have followed Strath-
more without pause or fear.
When he bowed his head and went down towards
the sea through the winds and the gloom, she left the
archway of the door, and silently and softly pursued
his steps over the mossy ground, strewn with rent
boughs, and fallen fir-cones, along the steep and wind-
ing path which led to the beach. The gusts loosened
her hair and tossed it floating on the air, the thunder
of the skies and waters echoed from hill to hill, the
lightnings made their mad war about her feet. Still
she went on she whom the storm could destroy as it
destroyed the fairy-bells of the forest lily went on
without fear, for she followed him.
A wild night !
A night to drown death shrieks like the cry of a
curlew, and play with men's lives as with wisps of
straw. A night with the black seas ya^vning in
fathomless graves, and the hissing of the surge,
filling every moment that the thunder lulled. No
rain fell ; the air was hot and arid ; the dense clouds
looked to stoop and touch the wave where it rose,
a mighty wall of w^ater, mountain high. A darkness
impenetrable brooded over land and sea, when the
54 STRATPIMOKE.
lightning ceased for some brief second, and when it
blazed afresh the heavens were filled with its flame
that lit up the white stretch of beach, the Titan rocks
that glittered, steel-like, in its light, the vast Druidic
forests of the Abbey stretching westward, and the
boiling, seething, roaring abyss, where the sea de-
voured its dead in the horror of night, to smile calm
and sunny in the morning dawn, when its work would
be done, and its prey rot below, with the sand in their
eyes and the salt weeds in their hair, and the nameless
things of the deep creeping over their limbs over the
childish brow that had been flushed Avarm with sleep a
few hours before, over the long floating tresses that
had been played with by a mother's hand, over the
lips which had been sought in the bridal softness of a
good-night caress. For the sea is fellow-reaper with
death, and, like his comrade, will not spare, for youth,
or love, or pity, for childhood's cry, or mother's prayer,
or gallant strength of manhood.
It was a wild night. The wind rose in sudden
blasts swift and fierce as a simoon, sweeping down
from the wooded heights of the ancient monastery
over the darkness of the sea, and driving against each
other the great masses of the clouds like armies
hurled together. The deafening roar of waters met
the thunder of the skies as they rolled back peal on
peal; and in the occasional glare the ship w^as seen,
black and spectral, with sails rent away, and masts
broken like willoAV boughs ; flung from side to side as
a lame bird is flung in cruel sport, now lifted on the
crest of giant waves, now sunk from sight in the
" MOEITURI TE SALUTANT !" 55
chasm of the closing waters, reeling, rocking, driven
at the mercy of the winds, alone in the trackless waste.
The minute-gun was silenced now, or drowned in the
tumult of the storm ; but ever and anon from the
tempest-tossed vessel tliere rose the shrill, piercing
wail of perishing souls, the cry in which Strathmore
had heard a voice as the voice of God, bidding him
who had destroyed life save it.
The beach stretching beneath the wooded cliffs of
White Ladies was almost deserted. There was no
fishing village near for several miles along the coast,
and there were no fisher-folk, no coast-guard men, no
boats, save the pleasure-boats kept for the Abbey,
pretty toys, shaped like Turkish caiques, that would
have been beaten to pieces in the storm like painted
butterflies. A few men had gathered on the shore
gamekeepers, lodgekeepers, woodsmen, labourers,
cotters ^looking helplessly on, full willing to succour
those in peril, but incapable of lending any aid ; they
had a great coil of stout rope with them, but they
gazed vacantly and sadly at it ; they had no means
to use it for any chance of rescue unless the storm
lulled, and some dared swim out to sea. They fell
back, and uncovered their heads as Strathmore' s step
was heard on the surf-splashed sand, and the light-
ning shone upon his face ; he did not seem to see
them, but stood looking outward to the ocean where
the ship was reeling through the trough of the waves.
In the uproar of the night, in the fury of the storm,
in the violence of the winds that swept the sea apart
5Q STRATHMOEE.
in yawning gulfs, and piled it high in beetling bar-
riers of foam, and flung it over the quivering vessel
as though it were some living thing they strove to
stifle and entomb, help from the hand of man seemed
hopeless; nothing but a life-boat could have lived
through such a sea.
He stood looking in silence outward, his head un-
covered to the winds, his eyes meeting the electric
glare unflinching, behind him the granite pine-crowned
slope of the cliff, at his side the group of men, silent,
too, and watching him with something of wonder, for
they had never seen their lord take heed of the waste
or cost of life upon the coast ; with much of anxiety
and hope, as the light flashed flickeringly about them,
for they knew how bold a swimmer he was, and had
heard through what storms he had brought his yacht
in distant tropic seas in years gone by. Unseen by
him, for she knew he would forbid her braving the
risks of the night if he saw that she had followed him
stood Lucille. Her arms were close wound about a
tall pine to lend her resistance against the gusts
that swirled through the forests, and bent the old
witch-elms like silver larches ; her long hair was un-
loosed, and filled with sear brown leaves blown in it
by the wind ; her eyes were gazing on him through
the blinding flashes, her face white to the lips, but in
awe with which fear for herself had no share, awe
that was filled with the pity, the terror, the sublimity,
the grandeur of the storm. The ocean, in her ima-
ginative creed, was the mighty servant of God, moved
" MOEITURI TE SALUTANT !" 57
by his voice and ruled by his will; eternal power
spoke to her in the rushing of the storm, as eternal
mercy smiled on her in the sunlight of the seas. She
had no fear; and she stood with her arms wound
about the knotted pine, and her hair floating back-
ward from her brow, as in the pictures of old masters
the young angel stands, serene and filled with an in-
finite compassion and love, while the earth is tempest-
rocked beneath his feet.
On the beach Strathmore looked outward over the
boiling waters, and alone far out to sea the lost ship
laboured.
The heavens were riven by a sheet of flame, the
vessel was distinct against the glare, so nigh, that
from the shore the crowd swarming on the deck
and clinging to the ropes were seen in the spectral
light. Then one huge wave dashed over her and laid
her down on her leeward side ; there w^as a crash, a
crushing splitting noise, that echoed to the land;
darkness fell over the face of the waters ; the moan-
ing wail of perishing lives pierced above the tempest
roar the ship had struck.
When the blaze shone out again, the wreck lay
with its hull out of water, stranded on a sunken rock,
a black and shapeless mass, a bow-shot only from
the shore ; more than a third of its freight of human
life had been swept off by the sea that had engulfed
it, and the remnant left clung to the shattered timbers,
their faces turned towards land, their shrill shrieks
ringing through the night. Strathmore's eyes glanced
58 STEATHMOEE.
over tlie short stretch of the channel which lay betwixt
the shipwreck and the beach, and measured it un-
erringly as unerringly he gauged the danger, almost
the impossibility, of any swimmer living through
those seas. Nevertheless he turned to the men beside
him :
" Fetch me a coil of rope."
" I've got rope here, my lord," said his head-keeper,
as they hauled the great coil nearer.
" We can't do not nothing, your lordship," said
another man, one of his tenant farmers. " God knows
I'd risk a bit to save those poor drowning wretches ;
but even a boat, if we had one, my lord, wouldn't live
through that ere storm."
" Most likely not," answered Strathmore, indif-
ferently, stooping to try the strength of the cable
with his hands, while the men grouped about him
with white scared faces and eager wistful eyes, that
strained now towards the wreck where it lay in the
heaving waters, now towards his movements, with the
dull mechanical anxiety and marvel with which those,
whom peril and emergency stupify, look on at him
whom they only nerve and arm. He was flinging off
his evening dress, lashing a lantern to his shoulders,
and knotting tight about his waist one end of the
rope. He knew that hazard ran a thousand to one
that the boldest and surest swimmer could ever breast
the mad fury of the seething waves and return alive ;
death waited for him in a hundred forms. He had
no pity, no yearning for those dying in the darkness
" MOEITURI TE SALUTANT !" 59
of the night ; and his philosophic creed had held in its
calm logic that death, as the universal law, reaps its
sure average every year, and that the mode of its
advent is of little import. Life was precious to him,
for his power, his intellect, his ripened triumphs, his
gathered honours, his influence over men and nations ;
it was as wide waste to risk his existence for that of a
ship's crew common sailors, wailing women, useless
children as to risk a man's for that of a dog. It was
not for them that he came to wrestle with the storm,
to rescue them or perish ; it was for the memory of
the dead ; it was for the wretched law of expiation,
which he had set t% himself with the iron sternness of
Mosaic law ; it was for the remorse which in its dark
hours forced him to any travail, to any sacrifice, to
any ordeal, which could wash the blood-stain from his
hand. Thus he had done great things unknown to
men, things of a noble charity, wrought on one in-
exorable principle of atonement, in silence and un-
seen of the world, even as in monastic days the soul
strove to cleanse and justify itself by pitiless penance
in cloister and in battle, among the plague-stricken
and the infidel, in the death-ranks of the Crusade,
and the reeking pestilence of the Lazar-wards.
He knotted the cord close about his waist, and
glanced once more across the boiling seas ; he was a
skilled and daring swimmer, and held all danger in
the sure measurement, yet the cool disdain, of a saga-
cious com-age.
" For heaven's sake ! my lord, you won't try those
60 STEATHMOBE.
seas!" said the men, involuntarily crowding nearer,
tlieir deference to his rank, and their first awed wonder
at his cool rapid movements, breaking down before
the imminence of the peril that he was about to en-
counter, sino;le-handed and unaided.
" Strathmore, for the love of God, what are you
about !" shouted one of his guests, who, with Caryll
and another, sprang down from the cliffs above,
having left the drawing-rooms soon after him to visit
the shore, not naming where they came lest they
should alarm the women ; the thickness of the pine-
boughs and the wood parted their path from where
Lucille stood, and they saw her n# more than he did
on the beach, as they plunged headlong through the
blaze of the storm down the slippery precipitate
path, strewn with broken branches and with loosened
boulders.
" Nothing wonderful," he answered simply ; " only
what any of my yacht's crew Avould do in a second."
"But no man can live in those seas !"
" Oh, I don't know. I have swam the Bosphorus
in rougher weather still."
Young Caryll laid his hand on his arm.
" Lord Cecil ! let we go ! I swim like a water-
dog, and your life is too great to be flung away on a
risk."
The youth's face was very pale, and his eyes shone
with excitement; he was of a generous, impressible
nature, and it touched him strangely to see one
whom he had known but as a haughty ambitious
"MORITURI TE SALUTANT !" 61
and caustic man of the world, ready to face death for
(as he deemed) the mere sake of those who suffered,
ready to peril life to succour perishing strangers.
" My life is required of me ; yours is not."
The brief, calm words bore no meaning to the
boy's ear, save that they refused to yield up place to
him, but his hand tightened still on Strathmore's,
and his voice, hurried and low, was drowned to any
other ear than his in the din of the storm.
" Let me go first at least, sir ! She would never
forgive me if I stood by to see you perish."
Strathmore started, and Nello could not tell whether
the quiver which passed over his face was one of pain
or was but the shiver of the flickering flash. He put
him aside with a brief command :
" I forbid you to peril your life ! and while you
talk the wreck is sinking."
Then, shaking himself free from the other men,
he plunged without pause into the dark, seething
breakers : the wild, broken cry of a young voice
rang out upon the night, as the waves closed over
him, but in the crash of the tempest, and the tension
of high-strung excitement, none heard, or none re-
garded it.
In the glare from the rent skies, those clinging to
the wreck saw him fling himself down into the boiling
chasm of the seas to save them, and gave him one
ringing cheer that pierced above the thunder and
drowned the dying, stifled shriek of those who were
washed at that instant into the darkness yawning
62 STKATHMOEE.
round. He knew that death was nigh ; he knew that
the keenest skill, the boldest daring, could do but
little against that mad mass of loosened waters ; He
knew that in a second's space the chance was, as a
million to one, that he would be flung back upon the
rugged granite of the rocks, torn, mangled, bleeding,
lifeless, or be beaten down under the weight of the
waves, never to rise again. Yet he gave himself to
the fury of the seas without hesitance, and let their
surging billow^s yawn for him and close above his
head, while over the wide waste of ocean the great
darkness again fell, and those who gazed, awe-stricken
and with tight-drawn breath, knew not whether the
issue would be life or death. The lightning shone
out afresh, and he rose, flung to and fro upon the
heaving foam, grappling hard with death and danger,
and refusing to be conquered : then, from the broken,
shapeless wreck a great cheer rose again, and rang
over the seas, sublime as a Te Deum, grand as the
lo Triumphe of the victor's psean ; it was the
"Morituri te Salutant!" of the dying to him who
died for them.
Thrice he was hurled backwards to the shore;
thrice, bruised, buffeted, borne down by the weight
of the waters heavily as by an iron mace, he swam
out again, striking the waves with steady, unceasing
strokes. The salt foam was in his teeth, and in his
eyes, the seas threw him hither and thither, and flung
him down into their depths. They cast him, now^
outward to the waste of the ocean, now, backward
" MORITUEI TE SALUTANT !" 63
towards the jagged beach rocks, where, once dashed
upon the granite, he would lie a shapeless corpse ;
now high upon the crested billows in the lurid glisten-
ing light, while the great bulk heaved and rocked
beneath him ; now, down into the chasm of the yawn-
ing seas, while the breakers swept over his head, and
in the darkness he heard the sullen roar sounding in
his ear and beating in his brain, and felt the surging
of the waves seeking wdiom they should devour.
Neither from wreck nor shore could his path be
traced, now and again when the lightning lit the
skies they saw his arms stretched out upon the black
expanse, where he \^Testled with the winds that blew
in his teeth and drove the waves upon him, and
swayed him to and fro as the current sways a straw.
Once through the shroud of darkness that covered the
deep, on which the wail of the drowning lives alone
was heard, the light lashed to him shone out for one
fleet instant, to be lost again in the impenetrable
gloom. Wlien it sunk from sight they could not
tell whether he yet lived amidst tlie fury of the seas,
or whether he were dashed upon the sunken reefs to
rise no more, until a rigid, sightless, broken corpse
should float upward in the dawn of the morrow's sun.
A great awe fell on those who watched and waited
for the issue of this contest of one human life with the
tumult of ocean and storm; their lips were white,
their breath was held, their brows were wet with
dew. They feared, they trembled, they suffered for
him as he never did for himself ; for in the jaws of
64 STEATHMORE.
the grave Stratlimore was calm, and with danger the
dauntless and defiant courage in his blood rose re-
solute. He beat his path through the salt blinding
water, recovering again and again every yard from
which the wind drove or the sea dashed him back.
None wrestling through the tumult of the night, to
reach what they loved best from the fast-siidving
wreck, would have fought a more endui^ing conflict
with the death which menaced him on every side,
than he who, with no human love, no human pity for
one of those for whom he gave himself, cast himself
into the devouring seas, for sake of a sterner and a
nobler duty, for sake of the atonement which should
save life by the same arm which had once taken life,
and wash out the stain of blood-guiltiness by the
ransom of lost souls.
The night was holy, the storm was sanctified to
him. With each time that he arose from the salt,
fathomless abyss, he was nearer to the expiation for
which he laboured. With every stroke by which he
forced back the murderous waters, he was victor over
the remorse which in its dark hours made him ac-
cursed in his own sight. With all the bruised, ex-
hausted pain of that wild work, as the ocean flung
him downward, and the winds hurled him against the
rocks, and the salt surf dashed in his aching eyes,
he felt but as in ancient days, those guilt-laden
and athirst for freedom from the memory and the
burden of their guilt, felt the points of the iron in
their flesh, or the torturing baptism of fire, as an
" MOEITURI TE SALUTANT !" Q5
atonement welcome and hallowed, a purification before
God.
For in these hom's the dark, grand, wild barbaric
nature latent in him broke out and ruled ; and shat-
tered down the creeds of the Statesman, the Courtier,
and the World.
At last he neared the rock, beating his way through
the uproar and the gloom, while above him the great
waves were like the towering crest of an Alpine
slope. For a moment the lightning died out, and in
the thick darkness he lay, waiting till in its glare he
should be able to reach the side of the stranded and
shattered hull. The blaze flashed out afresh, illu-
mining sea and sky, the measureless waste, and the
dark woodlands of the shore ; and at the instant
when the dying saw their deliverer, and in the stead of
death hope came to them the curled, reared waters
rolled, and swept up with a hoarse roar, like a lion's
when he is an hungered and baffled of his prey, and
broke upon the wreck. When they again severed
and left it free, the crowding lives had been swept
with them, and garnered to the grave; a remnant
alone was left : he was too late. The elements them-
selves mocked and denied him his expiation !
Where he looked upward to the shapeless, sinking
mass, the cry of the drowning, devoured ere he could
reach them, rang on his ear ; and from his own lips
a moan broke in the silence and solitude of the vast
waste.
" My God ! my hand is too accursed to save I "
VOL. III. F
QQ STRATHMOEE.
As tliougli in answer, from the riven clouds the
soft radiance of the moon shone out for one brief
space, bathing land and sea with its pale light after
the lurid glare of the storm. A few were left upon
the wreck four or five women and children and
youths ; these, in their mortal misery, turned their
eyes upon their saviour, and with that mute and ter-
rible prayer besought his succour. No wild shouts
greeted him as he swam to the wreck, and made his
footing on its slippery woodwork ; those who would
so have welcomed him, had a second before been
swept away to death ; yet, as he reached the sinking
ship, one, yards distant, wrestling for life in the trough
of the sea, saw him, and gave him a single ringing
cheer, the Moriturus te Saluto of the dying to the
victor ; then the voice ceased which in the throes of
death had been lifted to hail him who had come too
late, and in the black whirling water the sailor sank,
with that greeting on his lips to the stranger in whom
courage found its comrade.
The moon was shrouded now in darkening clouds,
that were driven swift as the hurricane across the
skies ; but the almost ceaseless play of the lightning
made it clear as day. He saw the white faces of
dead men rise up about him, and the dark floating
hair of women's corpses was blown over his hands as
he swam towards the reef, through the seas, which
were strewn with the flotsam and jetsam of the shat-
tered ship, and mounted with steady grasp the shehing,
slippery mass, which was all that was left of the stately
" MOEITUEI TE SALUTANT ! 67
veSvSel that when the sun had gone down had been
steering cahnly before the wind, with white sails set,
through a fair and bahny evening, over a laughing
aziu'e sea. When the few who were gathered together,
trembling and praying, waiting for instant death, and
scourged by the brutal stripes of the salt billows as
they broke, saw him ascend and stand amidst them,
giving his life for theirs, they fell upon their knees
and lifted their blanched faces, and blessed him and
prayed to him with tears of agony : their saviour
looked to them not man, but deity.
And as they wept and clung about him, and wor-
shipped him as their deliverer from death, he neither
saw nor heard them ; but in that moment when he
stood upon the deck, with the tumult of the storm
between him and the land which he might never
reach again between him and the life which was
filled with wealth, and power, and honour, and the
ripe fruitage of a great ambition Strathmore re-
membered but one, the Dead who in the long-buried
years had fallen by his hand : and from his lips a
prayer broke, more bitter and more yearning than
any which those who wept about his feet prayed for
their deliverance from the grave :
"Oh God! Let Mz5 atone ! "
He bade those trembling and quivering in the terror
of the night be still and of good cheer, and with the
aid of the youths lads who had been passengers in
the ship, and could not swim he unwound the rope
r2
68 STRATHMOEE.
from about his waist, and fastened it tightly to a
ring-bolt ; the other end had been held b}^ those on
shore, and, made taut, it stretched a narrow bridge
through the pathless waters, a frail yet precious aid
through the great abyss that yawned between the
drowning, and the land where lay deliverance and
safety. It was a hideous passage through the
curved walls of the giant waves, through the black
salt chasm filled with the hollow roar of voracious
billows, through drenching, merciless blows of solid
waters, with but that one vibrating cord as plank be-
tween them and their destruction !
Yet the love of life is a master-passion, and makes
the feeble strong, the coward daring, the weakness of
womanhood cope with the force of giants. It was
their sole chance : one by one, in the glare from the
heavens or by the flickering lantern-light, he directed
them to descend, and pass along the rope where it
stretched through the foam and the gloom. There
were wild disorder, delirious panic, the fever of hope
conflicting with the horror of despair, the abject
anguish of helpless women. But the same tranquillity
and resolve which bore down the opposing factions of
states and ministries made their might rule here ; he
who is calm and resolute in peril is a king among his
fellows. One by one he made them descend, holding
back the reckless, encouraging the fearful, warning,
guiding, commanding each, bidding each be of strong
heart and of sure courage through the perilous and
dire passage. Seven lives w^ere launched by him on
" MOEITURI TE SALUTANT !" 69
that frail bridge which he had perilled his own life to
give them, where it hung vibrating above the boiling
surf, and passing through the gorge of the waves.
One alone was swept down into the abyss, and pe-
rished; six were rescued, and one by one he saw
them reach the shore, and received by those waiting
there, in the ruddy gleam of the beacon-fire hastily
piled on the sands from the broken pine-boughs and
the resinous firs. He had saved them. Six lives
wrestled for with death, and brought from out the
grave ; might not these expiate one taken ?
Standing on the wreck, which he refused to leave
while any were still unrescued, he looked across the
sea as the wild shouts which welcomed those whom
he had succoured, and saluted the grandeur of his
act, rang loud through a pause in the uproar of the
storm ; and on his face a light shone which had never
been there in the days of his youth, and in his eyes
came a sublime serenity; the peace, the gratitude, the
rest with God and man, of the soul which, after
lengthened years of travail and remorse, is at the
last released from the brand and burden of its crime,
and purified by expiation.
The holiest hour of Strathmore's life was this in
which he stood alone in the wide desert of the ocean.
70
CHAPTER IV.
LOST IN THE HOUR OF REDEMPTION.
Two yet remained, young boys but little out of
infancy, for whose delicate hands and fragile limbs
the passage by the rope was hopeless. Their mother
had been swept from them when at the first crash
upon the reef the vessel had parted amidships, and
half her human freight had perished : the children,
by the wild caprice of the seas, had been spared,
and sat locked in each other's arms, the elder comfort-
ing the younger, strangely stilled and in the awe of a
voiceless terror. Strathmore looked down on them,
then stooped and touched the elder, a little fellow of
some seven years, whose fair locks were drenched in
the brine and surge.
" Leave your brother and trust yourself to me. I
can only save you one at a time."
The child gazed up at him mth sad and dream-
ing eyes ; the horror of the awful night had left him
LOST IN THE HOUR OF REDEMPTION. 71
passive, his eyes were tearless, and liis face very
white. He loosened his arms from the little four-
year-old, and motioned Strathmore to take him instead.
They were French children, for the ship was a Havre
vessel bound for America.
" Take Victor first, not me ; my mother loved him
best."
The plaintive heroic answer was drowned in the
hurricane, but Strathmore heard it, and lifted up the
younger, as the boy bade him.
" I will save you both. Have no fear. You are
a brave child."
He took the other in the grasp of his left arm, who
was all but unconscious from cold, from terror, and
from the blows of the heavy billows, and plunged
down once more into the waters. As he quitted the
wreck, he saw one whom he had not noted a woman
lying prostrate, insensible, perhaps dead. It was too
late to go back ; when he returned for the boy he
could rescue her if she lived; and he gave himself
once more to the madness of the ocean, this time with
the dead weight of the young child hanging wearily
upon him.
From the shore they saw him leave the deck thus
laden, then they lost sight of him in the deep trough
of the heaving seas ; in the darkness they knew not
whether his life had been laid down in ransom for
those whom he had saved, or whether he wrestled
with the seas again to be again their victor. The
blackness of night brooded over land and water, while
72 STEATHMOKE.
the sullen roar of tlie thunder rolled through the ah',
and the equmoctial fury of the winds lashed the storm
to its height they knew not whether he lived or
perished.
Then, where the gleam of the fire on the beach was
cast red and lurid upon the breakers, as they rolled
upward, crested with white hissing surf, they saw him
rise, bearing the burden of another life.
Smft as thought, Lionel Caryll flung himself into
the sea, and swam to meet him. Strathmore threw
the young boy to him, and, without pause, turned
and went backward to redeem the word he had given
to the child left there by his own will to perish, that
his brother might be saved. Once more back through
that terrible travail of life with an impending death ;
once more through the passage of the trackless seas,
through the darkness of the tumultuous night,
through the massive waves, with the brine in his eyes
and his teeth, with the bodies of the dead floating
around him, with the winds hurling him hither and
thither, and striking him blindly with great masses of
cui'led water. Once more; while now, his breath
came in laboured gasps of pain, and every sinew
throbbed with the unnatural strain, eveiy muscle
quivered, every bone ached; while his throat was
parched, his eyes starting, his temples aching ; while
he had to combat with a yet direr and more insidious
foe than the ocean, in the exhaustion which was slowly
gathering over all his limbs, and stealing out the life
and power from his frame.
LOST IN THE HOUK OF EEDEMPTION. 73
Yet strength of the will conquered weakness of the
body ; he reached the rock afresh, and the wistful eyes
of the boy, gazing into the night, saw his deliverer
return faithful to his word, though it was but pledged
to a lonely child. vStrathmore ascended the stranded
wreck, and paused to rest, and gather force to reach
the shore in this last passage, whose peril was more
imminent than all. A brief breathing-space sufficed
to give him back some strength; his muscles were
of steel, his powers of endurance great, and his ascetic
life had left his frame firm knit as in his earliest
manhood. As he paused, and looked down to where
in the darkness the vvaves were dashing the wood and
iron of the devoured ship together, and whirling the
dead bodies of the drowned men in wreathing phospho-
rescent light, he heard a sullen menace roll and groan
through the shattered hull on which he rested it was
the sure and ominous sound which preceded the part-
ing of the few broken timbers which still held together.
They were no longer safe for a single second ; one
moment more and the sea would break away, destroy-
ing all life which should remain near the abyss which
ya\ATied for them. It was quite dark ; the uncertain
glimmer of the lantern he had left upon the deck
was cast about his feet, but it shed no light on the
wide waste around, where the cry of the waves was
like the cry of desert lions, and the bodies of the dead
were washed against the reef, lit only here and there
by the weird phosphor-glitter on the surf. There
was no time for pause, for thought ; he stooped and
74 STEATHMOKE.
touched the woman lying at his feet ; she was uncon-
scious from terror or from a swoon, but he laid his
hand to her lips, and felt them warm ; in her bosom,
and her heart was beating. She lived; he could
not leave her there to certain death.
He bade the child mount on his shoulders, and
cling close so as to leave his arms free and his limbs
unshackled ; the boy, quiet and intelligent beyond his
years, comprehended and obeyed him ; then Strath-
more raised the woman's form, and grasping her
firmly in his left hand, felt his way with his right
along the rope down the side of the w^eck, which
every moment might yaw^n, and crash, and disappear,
and so committed himself yet again to the fury of the
seas, thus heavily laden with the burden of two lives.
The thick darkness was around him; he could see
neither the waste that stretched before, nor the
vaulted skies which brooded above him. He sank
as he first swam out from the side of the ship ; the
gi'eat waves washed over him, and he held himself as
lost, w^ith the child's hands clinging round him, and
the weight of the woman hanging on his arm. The
waters closed over his head and over the boy's fair
curls, and he felt the salt billows surging in his ears
and stifling his breath : he heard the rushing of the
surge, he knew that he was sinking to his grave.
Better, he thought, for him to perish so better to die
thus in the supreme martyrdom of a grand labour, in
the great ransom of a holy expiation. His death
might absolve his life ; he might then yield up his
LOST IN THE HOUE OF EEDEMPTION. 75
soul in peace with God and man ; having sinned
much, yet much atoned ?
But death was not for him in that hour.
The long hair of the woman swept across his lips ;
he shuddered and sickened at its touch, he knew not
why, as he had never done at the sharp agony on the
jagged rocks, or the blinding blows of the massed
water. By his involuntary movement his foot touched
the projecting timber of the sunken wreck ; instinc-
tively he struck with all his force against the beam, so
that the impetus given might send them upw^ard to
the surface ; he rose, and they breathed again, floating
in the impenetrable darkness on the face of the ocean.
Life was yet his and theirs whom he had saved, and
he lay on the waters, parting them with the strength
of his single arm, while afar off through the dense
gloom gleamed the leaping flames of the beacon fire.
His hand grasped the woman's form, which he bore
up against the force of the hurled billows, and her hair
swept again against his lips, and her breath w^as on
his cheek, while she faintly awoke to consciousness
from her trance, as they moved through the icy air.
Thus they passed together through the darkness of
the night, through the tumult of the storm, through
the valley of the shadow of death.
Thus they passed together amidst the devouring
waters, with the innocent face of the young child
nigh them, and the cold limbs of the lost dead washed
against them.
As the last ransom of his soul from guilt, as the last
76 STEATHMOEE.
travail in liis ordeal of redemption, he was bidden to
save this woman's life.
Above, in the brooding skies, the dense clouds
driven by the hurricane were hurled on one another ;
the shock \^brated through the air, and pealed over
earth and sea. There was a hideous light which lit in
it land, and heaven, and ocean and in its gleam he
saw her face, the lips close to his own, the eyes filled
with a fearful agony, the trailing length of the amber
hair lying loose upon the waves.
And they knew one another, they whom guilt had
bound together, while they looked down into each
other's eyes, where they lay on the boiling, hissing,
bitter waters with the livid light upon their faces, as,
in the vision of the Poet, the doomed behold and re-
cognise each other sinking in the liquid fires of the
Lake Avernus.
She gazed on him with a dumb and terrible appeal,
for his will alone upheld her from the yawning abyss,
and back upon her ear through the mist of many
years rang words once uttered to her in the hour of
her extremity :
" If you were drowning before my eyes, and my
hand stretched out could save you, you should perish
in its need."
Beneath her, around her, leaping up to seize her as
hounds leap on their prey, the waves surged and
roared ; between her and destruction there stood but
the mercy of him to whom mercy was unknown ;
LOST IN THE HOUE OF EEDEMPTIOX. 77
death was upon her unless he gave his Kfe to save
her, he whom she had made a murderer !
A worse temptation than any that ever had assailed
his life, assailed him now, in the hour of his atone-
ment : had he still strength to rise above it ?
Afar off, on the hanging rock, under the monastic
w^oodlands, wath her arms w^ound about the gi'eat
stem of the pine, her fair hair floating in the wind,
her eyes gazing down into the raging seas, unblinded
by the storm, and opened wide with straining, yearn-
ing pain, stood Lucille : and her young face, white
and pure, and filled with a sublime light, was as the
face of an angel, and on her lips was one voiceless,
unceasing prayer to God for him, in whom she saw
but the deliverer from death, the saviour of the lost.
Had he looked tliere he might still have conquered,
still have endured ; and saved himself from the fresh
guilt which uprose and curled about him from out the
slimy bitter waters like some loathsome shape from
the depths of the sea. But the ringed lightning circled
him, eddying round in its ghastly glare, a wdiirlpool
of flame fire burning on the icy gulf and by its
light he and the woman who had betrayed him gazed
alone on one another as their faces rose above the
seething mass.
They met again.
In his eyes there came the dark, merciless gleam
of the passions which were not dead but sleeping,
the ruthless thirst of the vengeance which no time
78 STRATHMORE.
could satiate, no draught could slake : she was his
temptress still. The noble serenity, the thankful
rest of one who has laboured for absolution, and
won his way to meet atonement, passed from his face
^perhaps for ever. Where the lurid flame gleamed
on it as he rose above the foam, it grew white and
rigid with deadly menace.
And his hand unloosed its hold, and left her alone
upon the fathomless seas.
" Die as you condemned him to die !"
The words hissed to her through the tumult of the
storm, and her eyes gazed up to his with a mute, ap-
pealing terror, yet with a hatred bitter and brutal as
his own, where she was left to perish, the water reach-
ing to her livid lips, her brow turned upward in the
scathing light. Then, in the circle of the azure flame
that played upon the chaos, Marion Yavasour sank,
downward, downward, till the loose trail of her float-
ing hair was beaten beneath the billows.
A moment, and he knew what he had done. An
agony of horror fell upon him, he plunged down
again into the depths again and yet again, he
swept the waters with his arm ; he searched for her in
vain search ; he grasped the gliding waves, the salt
and slippery foam : that was all !
Darkness fell over the ocean, and darkness as of
the night covered his own soul, which for one hour
of travail and of martyrdom had soared upward to
God's light, and had failed in the supreme instant of
LOST IN THE HOUR OF KEDEMPTION. 79
victory, in the crowning ordeal of temptation. She
had been his temptress again, and again he had fallen ;
again through her he knew himself accursed ! And
on his face a great misery gathered, for the weight of
his guilt lay afresh upon his life, and the work of his
expiation was tainted and shattered, and in vain ;
his ransom had been lost even as it was redeemed.
No human sight had looked upon that aw^ful meet-
ing on the waste of the ocean ; its history was hidden
in the shroud of the storm, in the wildness of the
hurricane, in the beating of the seas ; the darkness
brooded over land and water, darkness impenetrable,
filled with the rushings of the winds and the roar of
the ice-chill breakers. When the light broke forth
again from the riven skies, they saw him towering
above the boiling waters, and holding the young child
aloft; erect, and with measured movement he came
through the surf breaking breast high upon the
shore, the glare upon his face, the cold surge parted
by his arm. Then, as the shout of those who wel-
comed their deliverer vibrated through the midnight,
Strathmore reached the land and, without word,
without sign, reeled and fell as one dead.
A cry, w^ailing through the night, rang on the
silence as he fell.
There was a swift, noiseless sweep, as of a sea-
bird's wing, past those who gathered round him; in
tlie beacon's light they saw wdiat seemed to them a face,
80 STRATHMOEE.
rather of heaven than of earth. Lucille sank clown
beside him, where he lay on the wet beach.
" He is not dead ? He '\\all be saved ? he will be
saved r'
Her voice, in its anguish of appeal, thrilled above
the tumult of the storm, above the hoarse roaring of
the breakers; it pierced through the mists of the
exhaustion which clouded and dulled his reason ; a
shudder ran through his frame where he lay stretched,
felled in his spent strength, like a stately pine that
the tempest had broken and laid low.
"Saved? No. Lost!''
His mind awoke to its guilt ere his senses revived to
the world ; but the low delirious words died muttered
and unheard upon his lips. Life was dark and mean-
ingless to him ; he remembered nothing save that dim
horror of unexpiated guilt ; the noise of the rushing
seas was in his brain, the throes of a great suffering
throbbed and quivered through his strained limbs, an
iron weight seemed to lie on him, crushing the
breath from out his chest, as the lead and beams were
piled on the condemned in ancient days ; he was
sinking down, down, into a fathomless abyss, while
the amber hair of his temptress twisted and writhed
and netted round him, and would not let him loose !
His eyes unclosed, and opened blindly and in pain
to the wild fury of the night, to the whirling of the
lightning blaze, till he saw the child-face above him,
with its fair angel light. What had she to do there,
in the night, in the storm, mth the black seething
LOST IN THE HOUR OF EEDEMPTION. 81
waters, with the giddy flame ? In a faint, unconscious
gesture, he stretched out his arms :
"Lucille!"
Their eyes met ; and with a low, delirious laugh
of joy she sank senseless down on the dank sands, her
head bowed unconsciously on his breast, her bright
hair trailing in the surge, the virginal flowers that
crowned it tangled with black beach-weeds.
And in that moment, as he met her eyes in the
dizzy glare that swept over earth and sky and ocean,
a light more terrible than the death-fire that played
upon the sea flashed through the blind mists before
his brain.
He knew that Lucille loved him.
VOL. III.
82
CHAPTER V.
The dawn broke, the pine-boughs were bathed in
the light, the snowy surf was tossed upon the beach,
the waves swept up with stately measure, and broke
in melodious murmur on the shore, and the cuidews
flew through the fresh air. Earth, and sky, and
ocean kept no record of their work, and over the
sunken reef where the ship had found her grave, the
wild blue waters, rearing in the sun-gleam, broke in
joyous idle mirth, crested with snow-white foam.
Beneath the waves, far down in the salt depths,
were floating lifeless limbs and trailing hair, tangled
with the noxious weeds and briny grasses of the
sea-bed ; on the shore dead forms were stretched
and dead faces were tmiied upward to the light,
presently to be lain, nameless and unmourned in
the shadow of the old monastic church, in the
shelter of the still Druidic woods ; and as the sun
" AND KETRIBUTION AROSE." 83
rose, and shed its warmth upon the waters one life
trembled between earth and eternity. It was that of
Lucille.
Through the horror of the night, through the peril
of the storm, an unnatural strength had upheld her
while his life was ventured ; when he was saved, the
tension broke like a bow over-strained. The nature
which had found its power in love, and had kept its
vigil in the air laden with death, was like the sacred
light which burns in a porcelain lamp ; the brighter,
the fuller, the purer the light from within, the frailer
the human-wrought porcelain which prisons it, the
surer to break and be shattered to dust, that that
light may escape heavenward, to be lost amidst its
own likeness, which it has not found on earth.
With her cheeks deeply flushed, with her hair still
wet by the heavy sea-spray, with her eyes closed in a
stupor that was never sleep, or opened wide in vague
wild fear, she lay unconscious of all which passed
around her. She deemed herself still on the sea-
shore, clinging to the fast-rooted pine, and beholding
the war of life with death, waged in the dark seething
waste below. Her low, swift voice, full of the softest
music, was never silent ; incessantly and incohe-
rently, with a sad, sweet, wild pathos, it spoke now,
of the black mountainous waters, that were burying
him beneath them ; now, of the terrace-roses which
he had told her were the flowers of sin, the flowers of
revel why had he said that? what was it that he
meant? now, of the solitary, nameless grave lying
g2
84 STRATHMORE.
under the ivy coils and woodland grasses by the old
monastic church, which she had seen in the morning
light ; why was it Lucille' s grave ? was she to lie
there when she died ? and now ever and again of
the wild storm-night, of the dying cries ringing above
the tumult of wind and water, of the dead floating in
the white lightning glare of the seas which stood
betwixt him and her, of the fathomless ocean-depths
where he had sunk for ever, of the death whence
he would never return.
It was strangely piteous that delirium which spoke
of him unvaryingly as dead, and betrayed in its un-
consciousness a love which was the core of her life.
Pacing the terrace beneath her windows, which
stood open, Strathmore heard it; and had his foes
beheld him in that hour, they would have known,
then, where to strike, and reach the life which, in all
else, was chill and invulnerable as the cold polished
steel.
Those who did see him when the day came, thought
that the haggard, broken look which his face wore
was the weariness of shattered strength; that the
dark and hollow circles beneath his eyes, the air of
spent force and worn-out pain, which had displaced
the repose of his face and the proud, negligent dignity
of his bearing, were but the result of the past
night, were but the physical prostration attendant on
his physical injuries. They did not know them as
they were ; they did not know that bodily suffering,
and the exhaustion of powers overstrained, were un-
85
felt by him. What made him sick unto death was
the dark knowledge of the guilt shrouded in the
blackness of night, buried in the sepulchre of the
seas ; what bruised and broke the haughty egotism
of his strength, was the impotent, baffled sense of
despair, before the expiation which was undone
before his sight, and beyond the power of his hand
to stay.
He had striven to a gi'eat atonement, and he had
given his life to its travail ; and as he reached it, it
had perished from his grasp, and left the guiltless to
suffer for his sin !
He knew that Lucille loved him.
Standing there, where he had made his way into
the cool fresh air, he heard in every accent of the
voice, which thrilling with pain and rising in plaintive
appeal echoed to him through the opened casements
above, the love which he had never dreamed or feared
until that hour when his eyes had met hers, and he
had known it as no words could ever have told it to
him. And his first sense then had been one of fierce,
sweet, sudden joy. No other could steal her from
him ! The next, remembrance returned, and a re-
volted self -accusing agony swept away all touch, all
chance, all thought of that forbidden gladness which
it only needed memory to destroy for ever.
He knew himself a murderer ; his hand could not
seek hers with a husband's touch, knowing that on it
lay the stain of blood-guiltiness ; knowing himself for
what he was, he could not take a soilless life to lie
86 STEATHMOEE.
within his bosom. Shrouded from her sight, between
them arose the eternal barrier of his crime, severing
for ever the guilty from the innocent. Though
through long years of joy she were never to learn
the secret of the heart on which she were bidden to
rest her own^ never to hear in the still watches of the
night one unconscious word which should unfold her
the covered crime which haunted sleep, the union
would yet be unholy a dark, forbidden sin against
her sacred innocence.
For the blood-stain was fresh upon his hand ; and
where he stood in the silent dawn, looking outward to
the sea, he shuddered. In the light of the breaking
day he saw but the black chasm of the yawning
waters, and the livid face turned upward, and sinking
slowly in the guilty night downward and downward
till it was lost for ever.
He abhorred himself, as he thought of the atone-
ment so hardly laboured for, so nearly won by the
strength which had passed through its martyrdom,
to be vanquished by its own passions at the last
ere it had grasped the victor's crown. For although
the one sin lay buried in the past, and the other had
been shrouded for ever from all human sight and
ken, in his conscience he was none the less branded
as the destroyer of Life ; in his own knowledge
divided none the less from all innocent and hallowed
things, from all pure and holy youth.
And Lucille loved him !
He, who for the sake of the dead would have given
" AND EETEIBUTION AEOSE." 87
his life for hers, was powerless before the retribution
which arose from out the office of his solitary expia-
tion. She must lose all the beauty and the glory of
her youth in the shame of a hopeless and an un-
accepted love ; and he must never let loose one word
of consolation, one caress of tenderness ! He was
powerless ; she must suffer, and he must behold the
life he had sworn to guard from all breath or con-
sciousness of human grief and worldly evil, smitten
and accursed through him 1
He had never by the faintest thought foreseen this
issue of the care, and the fidelity with which he had
followed and fulfilled the trust bequeathed to him by
Erroll; he had never feared or dreamed that she
could ever feel for him any emotion deeper than the
filial and childlike tenderness she bore him as her
guardian. Of the good that he had done, the fruit
was evil! And far back through the stretch of
many and forgotten years the words of Redempta the
Bohemian came to him :
" The past has been wrought by yom* own hand,
but the future will escape you The sin to
the guilty has been avenged, but the sin to the inno-
cent will never be washed away ! "
The future escaped him. And a great despair was
on him : he fought against fate, he strove as mth
God's vengeance for a slaughtered life !
From above, in the silence of the waking day,
he heard ever the plaintive wail calling upon his
55 STEATHMORE.
name with the delirious words of an unconscious
love. He could not hear them and not seek her;
he felt that he must silence them at all or any
cost. Were she to die for him, to die through
him !
He entered the house and approached her chamber ;
on the threshold his mother met him, but he mo-
tioned her aside.
" Let me see her ! I stand in h-er father's place."
In the hour of extremity the world is forgotten ;
she let him pass, and he stood in the stillness of the
early day, in the chamber filled with the ceaseless
moan of the voice that called upon his name.
Where Lucille lay, the light from the sunlit east
fell on her, deepening the golden hue of the hair,
damp and clogged with the clinging sea-water, the
fevered, scarlet flush upon the cheeks, the wistful,
haunting pain in the dreamy eyes ; and as the full
light on the heather-bell, where it lifts its delicate head,
on the bloom of the flower, or the hue of the sea-
shell, shows their beauty, only also to show their fra-
gility more, so in the brightness of morning he saw,
as he had never seen before, how frail was the life
on which the w^ork of his expiation was garnered.
All of atonement that could be made by him to the
dead hung on this brief existence.
He stood in the shadow of the chamber and gazed
on her; in that hour he loved her, purely, deeply,
" AND EETPJBUTION AROSE." 89
willing to give his peace for hers, as he had never
loved ; the one sacred and unsullied thing in a life
world-corroded and sin-stained.
Where she lay her face was turned towards him,
her hair swept backward from her brow; her eyes
looked 'upward with a sad, wild pain, and she raised
herself, with a piteous gesture of appeal, as the vague,
unconscious words came swift and plaintive from her
lips, murmuring the strange burden of a weird,
mournful, Scandinavian legend, woven in her
thoughts by the unbidden wanderings of fever :
" Roses my secret keep,
While those around me sleep !
What does that mean ? The roses may hear, but
they cannot whisper again ? He would not have me
gather them ; he called them the flowers of sin.
Wliy, why ? Others must have sinned to him ; he
never sinned. Pie is so great, so noble. He cares
for me for my father's sake ; only for that ! If he
loved me he would not have bidden me 20 to stran-
gers ? He knew Lucille had no love but for him.
Perhaps he was angered because I gathered the
roses ? "
The words died away wearily, while in her gaze
came a troubled, wondering look. And he on whose
ear that innocent voice rang, stood, with an iron
calm on his face and the darkness of guilt on his
soul ; smitten by those words as by the voice of an
accusing judge.
90 STRATHMORE.
Then a wild terror leapt into her eyes ; she lifted
herself, with her hands outstretched, and a wailing
cry :
" He is dead ! He is dead ! The seas have covered
him ; he cannot rise ! Look, look ! it is so dark,
there is no light ; the waters are on him ; they have
buried him ! Let me go, let me go oh my God !
and die with him ! "
Her voice rose in passionate anguish, her hands
were stretched out to the empty air, her eyes were
filled with the misery with which they had followed
and sought him through the horrors of the storm ;
she lived through all the torture of that awful night,
in which she had seen his life ventured and given to
the mercy of the storm.
He heard the piteous appeal of the love which in
that hour he would have suffered a hundred deaths
rather than have known, given to himself ; and he
saw that if any could save her he could alone.
He moved from the shadow where he stood, and
drew near her bed. He took her hands within his
own, and his voice was calm, with that tranquillity
with which Strathmore could rein in and veil his
deepest passions, his most bitter agony.
" Lucille, look at me ; I am with you ! My life
is safe, and what harm can touch you whilst / am
near?"
His words pierced through the mists in which her
brain was wandering ; he held her hands within his,
and his eyes looked down with a serene and loving
91
liglit into her own, wliich met them with bewildered
pain. And slowly and soothingly the calm fixed gaze
magnetised hers, and tranquillised her like the steal-
ing peace of the lotus-fumes, which give i^st to the
weary limbs, and lulling dreams. The love which
had endangered now restored her life ; she knew his
voice, his touch, his gaze, as she had kno-^^i no
other's; the terror passed from her face, a smile,
faint but sweet as the glad light of the dawn, shone
on it ; and, as her head drooped and sunk in exhaus-
tion, her eyes looked upward to him with the love so
unconsciously betrayed.
The sun rose higher over the laughing seas, the
white mists of the hills rolled back before the bright-
ness of the day ; still she lay there, her head resting
on his arm, her hand lying in his, her hair sweeping
his breast, and while a touch could waken her he
would not move. His strained sinews ached and
throbbed, as those of men taken off the rack, his
limbs were bruised and torn by the conflict of the
waves, sickening pain and blindness were still on him
from the unnatural tax his strength had borne. But
he did not stir, nor seek to release himself from the
constraint of the attitude in which he leant over and
supported her, till her restless, wakeful, still half-de-
lirious slumber had deepened in the hushed calm of
the silent chamber into the surer sleep of safety, with
which the fevered flush faded from her cheeks, her
breathing grew low and tranquil, her face lost its
look of pain, and the life of Lucille was spared.
92 STEATHMORE.
Then he gently loosened his hands from hers, un-
wound the hair which had coiled about his arms,
moved her from him without breaking her rest, and
going out from her presence passed to the solitude of
his own chamber.
Unseen, his mother followed him. He did not
move, nor tm^i his eyes to her ; he stood silent and
motionless, while the dark, heavy folds of the portiere
swung behind her ; he knew her words ere they were
spoken in his ear.
" It is you whom Lucille loves ! "
" I know it."
" You know it, Strathmore ? "
'' I knew it last night."
His mother's hand tightened where its light tena-
cious hold lay on his shoulder, and her voice, haughty
and mellow still in her declining years, sank lower yet :
" And you "
He put her hand from him, and moved to the
deeper shadow of the mullioned window. She was
answered.
A shudder ran through her frame, and her lip
quivered, her voice sank lower still, as in the awe of
an unutterable horror.
" Oh, my God ! It must never be ? "
" No. It must never be."
His voice was calm; but there was that in its
tranquillity which appalled her with a great terror ;
she was his mother, and she loved him. It was not
for her voice to lift itself and say, " Behold ! the guilt
" AND EETKIBUTION AEOSE." 93
was yours, it is but just that its chastisement should
overtake you, and be also yours ! It is but meet and
due ! "
She was his mother, in his remorse she had suc-
coured him, in his retribution she yearned to him.
" My son ! my son ! " she cried, wearily. " You
suffer "
" I ! "
The word rang out in passionate loathing and
condemnation of himself; Strathmore had in him
the nature of those who, in the days of Basil and
Chrysostom, in the austerity of remorse, gave up to
pitiless torture their bodies for their sins.
" I ! What matter ho\^ / suffer ; it will be but
just. It is she she the guiltless ! "
His voice fell, the dark veins swelled upon his
temples ; he moved from her again, and sank down
with his head bowed upon his arms. She had broken
the deadly calm which in men of his blood and race
she knew and dre'aded most ; but where she stood by
him, she the aged and imperial woman, who, in all
her years, had known no fear trembled, and was
afraid, for she had never until this hour beheld the
bonds of his passions loosened, or the cold pride of his
strength beaten down.
" Heaven help her ! " she said, brokenly. " She will
suffer she must suffer. But it could never be,
Strathmore ? It were too horrible ! You ^you "
" A murderer ! Say out the word."
His voice rang loud and hoarse, with his hatred
94 STEATHMOEE.
of liis own life, of his own soul ; and slie did not
know that the darkness, as of night, which was upon
his face, was that of fresh guilt ; that in the morning
light he saw but the whirl of the giddy waters, and
the white face upturned in the phosphor glare, and
the amber hair floating out on the black waste, and
beaten down beneath the foam.
" You have striven to atone you have done all
you could," she murmured. "" Effort is man's, Cecil ;
but the result is with God."
" Atone ! Ay ! I have laboured to atone,, but the
end of the atonement is accursed. I can destroy
that is devil's work! but I cannot expiate. My
peace, my life, my soul, I would give them all for
expiation ! and I cannot reach it. Cain bore his brand
for ever ; so do I."
The words were wild and hollow in their pain,
their bitter futile yearning ; the one cry wrung from
the shattered strength of a great lost soul.
And his mother shuddered as she heard, and covered
her face, trembling even as Eve before the guilt which
wrecked the mighty sin-stained life which she had
given, and which had once been nurtured guiltless in
her bosom.
For a long space there was silence between them,
and he seemed not to note nor remember her presence
where he stood looking outward to the early day, with
the darkness on his face, which had come there when
his hand had unloosed and left the dying to her grave,
95
and the light of sacrifice offered, of redemption won,
had died for ever from his eyes.
His mother lifted her head and looked at him, and
in her haughty eyes, which had rarely known such
weakness, blinding tears gathered tears for the
force and the weakness, the gi'andeur and the
guilt, the sanctity of remorse and the brutality of
hate, so strangely blent and woven in his nature,
whose will had power to conquer all save the passions
which ^vrought their own curse. She drew nearer to
him, while her voice was dropped so low that its
whisper scarcely stirred the air :
" Strathmore one word you ^vill not seek to
expiate the past by what would be but added sin ?
Love between you and his child could never, must
never, be ? "
" Love ! "
He shuddered as he spoke, and the haggard wea-
riness upon his face deepened, while his eyes were
bloodshot and filled with pain. The word was horrible
in his ear ; the name of that mad, sweet, delirious
sorcery, which he had known once, never to know
again; which even now, in hours of memory, he
longed for, as men yearn for their dead youth ; which
had been the Avell-spring of his crime, the poison on
his lips, the tempter in his soul, the beautiful vile lie
which had betrayed him and driven him to his crime.
" Love ! from her ! My God ! if she knew me as
I am ! ... . She would abhor me she would hold
96 STEATHMORE.
my very touch damnation. Wed her to her father's
destroyer ! Ay ! it would be but added sin. My Kfe
cannot and yet who would have cherished her
asl . . . .?"
The last words his mother did not hear, they were
stifled almost ere they w^ere spoken ; and with a ges-
ture he signed to her to leave him, and let him be.
His nature was too kindred with her own, she knew
too well the intolerant and silent souls of the men of
her race and blood, to disobey his will, or rob him of
the sole solace which is left to suffering solitude.
She stooped her proud head, and her lips rested on
his brow, and trembled there in the tenderness which
in his childhood and his youth she had never given
him, and which throughout her life had been very
rare in the high-souled imperious woman.
" My son ! God comfort you ; I cannot ! "
Then with that broken, murmured prayer, his
mother left him ; and Strathmore was alone. Alone
to see ever before his eyes the white upturned face,
met, after the lengthened stretch of many years, in
the darkness and tumult of the night, his temptress
and destroyer still ! Alone to know the labour of his
expiation stricken from his hands, the atonement he
would have yielded up all sacrifice to attain, broken
from out his grasp ; the hfe he would have given his
own to save, wrecked and condemned through him !
97
CHAPTER VI.
THE CHOICE THAT WAS LEFT.
Eefoke long, sleep, unbroken and restful, became
the sure saviour of youth. Lucille was left fragile,
fevered, with a certain startled fear in the dreamy
depths of her eyes, a certain weariness in their
drooped lids, but restored from the exhaustion and the
pain which turn by turn had succeeded to the ex-
posure of the night which she had braved.
The days passed slowly by, heavy, gloomy, early
autumn days, with white mists on the yellow wood-
lands, and stormy sunsets in the dark western skies
above the sea. The guests had all left, and the
hours wore lingeringly away at White Ladies, while
the spent strength and physical injuries, consequent
on his recent peril, with whose story the country rang,
gave sufficient reason for Strathmore's brief retire-
ment and rest there.
" ' Heroism,' ' Sacrifice,' ' Nobihty ! ' God help me !
VOL. III. H
98 STRATHMORE.
If tliey knew me as I am ! " he muttered, where he
stood m his private Hbrary, his eyes falUng on the
newspaper which lay open before him, where were
painted in vivid detail the terrors of the shipwreck, in
which alone and unaided one who was of value to the
nation, had given himself to the madness of the
waters and rescued six lives at peril of his own. The
act was grand and simple, and thrilled through to the
heart of the people. They gave him but that which
was his due ; yet Strathmore turned from it abhorring
himself ; for this man judged himself more rigidly
and cruelly than others would have judged him, and
in that innate truth which remained to him through
so much that was evil, recoiled from homage which
worshipped that in him, wliich he held solely as atone-
ment for his crime, and atonement wrecked and for-
feited at the last beneath temptation.
" They kneel to a false god ! " he said, bitterly, as
he flung the paper from him; yet, perchance, he
might be judged more mercifully than he judged him-
self, and the travail of self-sacrifice was not wholly
worthless, though imperfect and guilt-stained at its
close ?
He rose, and walked up and down the chamber;
he had an office to perform, and he feared the
durance of his strength, for he loved her. Not
with that sweet, wild passion which had broken
asunder all laws of duty and man, and been world,
conscience, eternity, to itself that comes but once in
a lifetime but more holily, more tenderly ; and with
THE CHOICE THAT WAS LEFT. 99
the intensity which those natures alone know, which
are, like his, cold to all the world save one. And
God help him! he longed to be enabled to believe
his love hopeless and unreturned, with more agonised
passion than ever a man prayed to have his love
echoed in the heart he sought. Loneliness, pain,
misery ; ay, even the fate which should bid him give
her with his own hand to her husband's embrace, he
knew he would have strength to bear in silence,
without self-betrayal; these, in all their suffering,
would have been mercy to that love which would
cui-se her through himself, while on his soul lay the
memory which forbade him to shelter, and shield,
and mingle with his own the young life which was
guiltless !
For one long hour his steps unceasingly paced the
room in solitude, then they turned towards hers. It
was the first day that she had risen the first hour
that they had met and he feared that ordeal as he
had never feared the death with which he had stood
face to face.
Her couch stood near one of the windows, and she
lay resting her head on her hand, and looking out-
ward to where the deer swept beneath the golden
foliage ; there was a fitful hectic on her cheek, a
weary drooping of the eyelids, a certain look of pain
and fever on her which smote him with sharp agony.
His was that touch which he had bidden be accui'sed,
by which her jchildhood and her peace had for ever
been scared from their rest! Yet he must live as
h2
100 STllATHMORE.
though blind to it, speak as though he had no know-
ledge of, no tenderness for it, as though he were
steeled and dead to the innocent fondness of the sole
living thing for which he cared !
Lucille knew nothing of the delirious words by
which she had betrayed herself. She had been
vaguely conscious of his hands holding hers, of his
eyes gazing on her, till the sense of his presence
soothed her pain and fear, and lulled her into happy
rest. She had been sensible of no more ; and it was
with no fuller consciousness of her own heart than
that which instinctively awoke with the first touch of
love in a lofty, delicate, and but too sensitive
nature, that she saw him now. It could have no
alarm, it could have little strangeness for her, this
affection which was still that of her childhood, only
deepened and taught to know that no other could
ever reign beside it; to love Strathmore seemed as
much the religion of her life as to love God. Her
head turned swiftly as he entered, a glorious light
beamed upon her face. With a low cry that thrilled
his heart with anguish, she rose and sprang towards
him, all forgotten save that peril from which he had
returned to her, the heroism with which he had
offered up his life for others through the hideous
dangers of the storm.
They were alone ; Strathmore stood silent, motion-
less, his face white, the veins standing out darkly upon
his temples ; he could suffer, he had passed through
enough to be well used to that, but the trial that
THE CHOICE THAT WAS LEFT. 101
awaited him was one far deadlier, it was to see her
endure the fruits of his own guilt! to know that
with one whisper, one gesture that should bid her
come to his heart and rest there, he could make her
happy, yet to have that single word, that single sign,
forbade him, and made horrible even in his own sight
by the foul crime of his ow^n past !
Power, riches, station, fame, the world's homage,
and the dignities of men, he would have given them
all to have stood guiltless before that one unsullied
life.
With that glory on her face which pierced him to
the quick, she drew his hands in hers, and laid her
soft lips on them in reverent worship, and looked up
in his face with broken words of love and honour,
and tears beyond all eloquence, beyond all gladness ;
he was a thousand times more beloved and reverenced,
come from the conflict where storm and death had been
braved, with martyr sacrifice, for the pure sake, as she
believed, of one grand, simple, human duty. And he
stood beside her, chained back by the bonds of crime
from all communion with the only thing he loved,
while on his hand her sinless lips gave their kiss of
sweet religious veneration, as to the hand which had
saved the sanctity of life !
All utterance of her affection had been so natural
with her to him from her childhood, that her heart
could not wholly awake to the knowledge that this
w^as that love which others begged from her ; a desert
child whom no breath of the world had ever touched,
102 STRATHMOKE.
and to whom no lips of man had ever whispered,
could not have been more divinely unconscious of all
profanities of passion than Lucille. Yet at the
look that was in his eyes as they met hers then
the words of homage paused on her lips, a light
shyer, sweeter, than had been ever there, came upon
all her face, with a flush sudden, and warm, and
fitful, bright as the blush of the wild rose ; she loosed
his hands, and her head sank. It was so lovely
that tremulous, half-conscious dawn of love ! One
who should have had no love for her in answer, look-
ing on her then, would have known but one instinct
and one response, to raise her in his arms, to gather
her to his heart, and bid her rest there; to soothe
with fond caress the loveliness startled into new
beauty with the new pulse that stirred it. And he
who would have given his life for hers stood beside
her, silent, responseless, forbidden from her by every
law of conscience.
Silence fell between them.
In that brief liour Strathmore suffered deadlier
chastisement than pursues guilt in the scaffold and
the grave ; he suffered as those suffer who behold
what they love and cherish slain through them. Yet
still that moment of silence given him he addressed
her with his accustomed gentleness ; he rebuked her
tenderly for the peril she had braved for his sake ; he
let her note no change in him. Only his voice un-
consciously grew cold in the strain which kept it
calm, and he never sought or gave that familiar
THE CHOICE THAT WAS LEFT. 103
caress which at meeting or at parting Lucille had
used to receive from him, as she would have received
her father's kiss.
That was for ever ended : the peaceful guardian-
ship of the life bequeathed to him could never again
be as it had been ; her love seemed to sunder her
farther from him than her loss to another could have
ever done ; his very hand was not fitting to touch hers
now, stained with the fresh guilt of an added crime.
He moved suddenly from her side. He had a duty,
bound by honour, to perform to an absent man, and
Strathmore had no thought to be false to that not
even to spare her. He had a trained strength to
endure, and his code of truth was lofty and severe.
His face was somewhat turned from her, but his
words were calm as he spoke :
" Lucille you read the letter I left with you some
days since'?"
"Yes!"
Her voice was very low ; a heavy misery began to
weigh upon her young fair life, still vague, still name-
less, the same which in delirium had found its plain-
tive shape in the words ; " he does not love me, or he
would not bid me go to others !"
His eyes were still turned from her ; his voice was
still tranquil and sustained. Such honour to the one
absent, who had trusted him as he could still keep, he
kept most faithfully.
"Lucille, I owe it to you and to him, both, that
you shoidd know I wrote no word there that was
104 STRATHMORE.
more than barren justice to Valdor and to to the
love he bears you. In a few days I shall be in Paris
for political matters : he will come to me for his
reply. He believed that your heart was his I
believed so also ^"
"You!''
The one word stayed those upon his lips ; the
accent quivered to his soul in its wondering, piteous
reproach. He could not plead another's cause whilst
he knew that every fibre of her life clung to himself ;
he could not bid her go wed where she had no love,
and live in the abhorred pollution of a joyless union.
He was silent many moments ; when he spoke, his
voice was hoarse and forced ;
"It was not so?"
Her eyes looked upward with the gaze that had
been in them when they had met his own in the light
of the storm, then her head drooped upon her hands,
while a flush of pain and of shame stole to her face.
" Oh no, no ! never ! "
He heard the words, barely above her breath though
they were, and he knew what was uttered in them ;
that loyalty to himself born of gratitude, of reverence,
of every hallowed and endearing memory, which closed
her heart to all others. He had no need to question
now what had parted them, when, in that which was
her love for him, he had believed he saw her love for
the one who wooed her. He knew but too well.
" It was I who misled him, then," he said, slowly,
letting no sign appear of the effort his words cost,
THE CHOICE THAT WAS LEFT. 105
save that wliicli made tliem sound cold in all their
gentleness. " I told him but what I honestly believed,
God knows, and to you I have done him no more than
honourable justice. He loves you well it might be
better if "
The phrase died unfinished ; his lips could not end
it ; her face turned to him one moment with an un-
spoken reproach more plaintive than all words, and
her eyes mutely questioned him why was the foster-
ing tenderness of his guardianship abandoned and
forgot, that he should send her to another's home
and bid her be an exile to another's love? Before
that look his forced tranquillity, his strained com-
posure, broke down. Master of his own suffering
still, for sake of her, the misery of his life, which
saw his solitary power of expiation shattered from his
hands, broke out in one involuntary utterance as he
bent to her :
" Oh, Lucille Lucille ! why is your childhood
over I I could guard you then ! ^"
He had said, without words, that they could never
be again as they had been, and all the loneliness of
abandonment weii^hed on her with the loss of that
guardianship which had never let her know one
touch of pain, one wish ungiven, or one desire un-
forestalled. She felt as he felt, though she knew
not why, as he knew, that the bond which had bound
them was severed, and could not be replaced by any
other. Of a nearer tie to him she had never thought ;
her love was too pure, too high, too wholly born in an
106 STRATHMOEE.
ethereal and reverent nature, to take grosser form
and definite shape; she only knew she had no love
for any save for liim, and that the tenderness which
he had lavished on her was for ever chilled and lost,
and that he had bade her trust herself to other care
and go to other hearts. He was the world to her
and henceforth she was as nothing to him.
He saw the peace he had sworn to save at any cost
desolate and broken through him ; he knew that he
had but to Hft her to his heart, and bid her lose her
guardian's in her husband's love, to make his own for
ever the life which had no law but his will, no joy
but from his hand, and to see beneath his roof, within
his home, before his sight by' day, and hushed on his
heart by night, the beauty of those young years, in
which was garnered his sole atonement to the dead.
And the work of his dead passions divorced them ;
the knowledge of his owti sin bade him stand aloof,
barred out from the life that suffered for him and
suffered through him.
That his crime might be veiled from her, he must
let her deem him insensible to the beautiful faith and
love she bore him ! he must leave her alone in her
desolation, powerless to solace or to save the life
bound in him and wrecked for him !
He was strong to endure himself, but he had no
strength to behold her suffer, as men have borne
the torture without a moan, tearing their own sinews
and rending their own limbs, but have been van-
quished when they were chained to witness the same
THE CHOICE THAT WAS LEFT. 107
ordeal wrenching the delicate form of the woman
whom they adored.
For one moment more he knew he could command
himself ; he stooped and laid his hand gently on her
bowed head.
" You ai'e still weak, my child. Rest now ; I will
see you later on."
Then he left her. A little longer, and his control
would have been wrenched down, his strength would
have failed him ; she would have seen betrayed the
darkness of a buried crime, the despair of a sleepless
remorse, on the face of him whom she thought great
and sinless, and held second only in her worship to that
God in whom she believed not more holily and utterly
than she believed in him.
Hours afterwards, as he crossed before the open
door of the great library, he saw Lionel Caryll ; the
young man leaned against the embrasure of one of
the oriel casements, his forehead bowed upon his arm,
his whole attitude full of a deep restrained dejection,
his face very pale as the light streamed through the
coloured panes upon his bright tawny hair.
On a sudden impulse one of those vague, un-
studied, and blind impulses which never before had
had place in his temper " or his life, an impulse of
desperation rather than of thought or of belief in its
own inspiration Strathmore entered and approached
him; the youth started and looked up, the warm
blood flushing his face.
108 STEATHMOKE.
" I absolve you from your promise. You may urge
your love to-day this hour when you will."
They were brief words, and uttered coldly, but to
the young lover they spoke of heaven: yet even as
the first startled gratitude flushed over his face in its
wondering happiness, he was chilled and awed by the
look upon Strathmore's. He could not translate it,
but in some vague sense he felt that the proud, silent
man beside him suffered.
Strathmore stood where his own face was unseen
by the }^outh.
"You are honest, loyal, and without guile. You
love purely ; her life will be safe vdth you. If you
can win her of her own will, without pressure, do so.
Keep her years happy, innocent, sheltered, you whom
she loves as a brother, and you shall ask nothing
from me that I Avill refuse. Go ; and speak as your
heart bids you."
He turned abruptly away, with a sign silencing all
reply ; for one moment he heard the rush of breath-
less words with which the young man strove to
thank him, and saw the flushed, tremulous ecstasy
of joy which beamed on his face as it only beams
upon the face of youth ; with the next he had left the
library, and the door of his own study had closed on
his solitude.
Hours more might have gone by, or only minutes,
he knew not which, when the door unclosed, and
before him stood the boy, whom he had sent from
THE CHOICE THAT WAS LEFT. 109
him a brief space before, in all the wild, sweet hope,
the rich iindoubting happiness of youth. Words
were not needed to tell his story ; one glance, and
Strathmore knew the issue of his errand, and the
sudden rush of a hot, swift joy which swept through
his veins felt to him like guilt. In all sincerity he
would have given up his life to any torture to know
that hers was safe where his own could never attaint
it with regret, or shadow, or the dark curse of his
own past.
He rose and laid his hand, with an unwonted gen-
tleness of pity, on his nephew's :
" Poor boy ! I only sent you to more pain ! "
Lionel Caiyll shrank from his touch, and his face
was turned away, while his voice shook :
" I only dealt her more ! She loves me as a brother !
I was mad to think it could be otherwise. I have
but wounded, startled, grieved her her for whom I
would "
His words died, his head sank, and in the desola-
tion of his grief he forgot all pride, and strength,
and shrinking shame of his young manhood, and,
throwing himself down, sobbed like a child.
Strathmore stood and looked on him: he had no
scorn for those tears they were for her but he had
a weary envy of them! and a smile of unutterable
sadness came on his lips. What was this boy's first
guiltless grief, beside that with which Life brims
over for those who suffer and give to the world no
sign ?
110 STRATHMORE.
His hand fell once more on tlie young man's, and
his voice, deep and softened, had a solemnity and a
compassion in it which had never before been in its
tone :
" Lionel ! your grief is bitter to bear, yet be
grateful that you can grieve there is suffering which
cannot ! Live so that you never know it ; keep your
life as it is now, without remorse, and it will be peace
beside that hell, however you suffer ! "
The youth lifted his head, startled and awed;
then it sank again, and his stifled sobs were heard
upon the stillness, vainly striven with for love of
manhood, while Strathmore paced to and fro the
chamber, with his head bowed, forgetful of CarylFs
presence. Some moments passed; then the young
man arose slowly and wearily, and the change was
piteous which had come upon his frank, bright,
careless face; all the sunlight was dashed from it,
and a pale, drawn misery left there in its stead. He
stood before Strathmore, and something proud and
noble came on him as he spoke vainly seeking to
make his voice steady and calm :
" Sir, I dreamed a fool's dream, and it has been
broken by Grod shield her ! the gentlest heart that
ever pitied pain. / can be nothing to Lucille ; less,
now that I have lost my title of ^brother,' than I
have ever been. / have no power to make her life,
as you bade me, ' happy, innocent, sheltered.' That
power lies in your hands, for it is you whom she
loves."
THE CHOICE THAT WAS LEFT. Ill
Where tliey stood together he saw Strathmore
shudder, and his cheek grow w^hiter; watching him
keenly, the youth saw that it was not with wonder,
but with a revulsion almost of terror that he heard
him the look which he had seen once before break
down the pride and reserve of the man whom he
feared, in the summer night at Silver-rest. And
even in the blind pain of his sharp sorrow, Nello
noted and mai'velled at that look ; whence could be its
spring ?
" You think this ? and why ? "
The tone was haughty, but there was forced
tranquillity in it ; Strathmore ceased to stand before
him, and passed again down the length of the
library.
"I feared it long; I know it now," the boy an-
swered him. " She may not dream it herself I
cannot tell ^but / read it in the very words with
which she put back my love, in the veiy pain with
which she shrank when I told her you had sent me,
free to plead with her as I would for for "
The joy which could never be his !
His voice failed him ; and Strathmore paced with
swift and restless step the silent chamber, his head
was sunk upon his breast, and in his heart was a
bitter cry :
" / deal her pain ! Oh, God, which sin must I
choose! the sin that spares her, or the sin that
smites her ? "
" Lord Cecil ! have you so much tenderness for
112 STRATHMOEE.
her, and yet have no love ? " cried the young man,
brokenly, for Lionel Caryll's devotion was untouched
with the selfishness of that passion which would slay
what it cannot attain.
"Nolove! i/"
The words were stifled Caryll did not hear them,
and pursued his generous, unselfish prayer :
" My lord I my lord ! You must know that she
loves you ? Will you, who are so tender a guardian
to her, close your heart to a fonder tie ? She cannot
love in vain ! Men call you jou. have seemed so to
me stern and heartless; but a cold nature had
never been gentle to her as you are, a merciless one
had never perilled life for suffering souls as you im-
perilled yours. Will you not have pity upon her?
Can you give her in her youth to misery, to hopeless-
ness, to the anguish which must be hers when she
has learnt her own secret for Lucille will never love
twice I "
" Boy, boy ! hush ! You do not know what you
tempt."
Strathmore had sunk into a chair, his head was
bowed, his face covered by his hands.
The young man stood before him, awed, marvel-
ling, deeply touched at the power his word had to
break the icy calm and the haughty pride of the
nature which for one moment he saw rent asunder.
" Forgive me," he faltered, while his unselfish
devotion to Lucille conquered every thought of self,
THE CHOICE THAT WAS LEFT. 113
and impelled him to plead for her as he would have
pleaded for himself, preferring her peace at loss
of his. " But but oh, Lord Cecil ! I spoke for
]m\ It cannot be that you have no love for her?
Can you refuse her a nearer place in your heart, in
your home? / have learned the bitterness and the
desolation of a hopeless love. I would give my life
that she should never know them ; they would be her
death-blow!"
" Peace ! for Heaven's sake !"
His voice was hoarse with a terrible anguish, and
barely above his breath ; his head was still bowed, his
face still covered. Each word which the boy spoke
in his guileless and unselfish prayer quivered like a
knife in his soul. Awe-stricken, and arrested with a
terror to which he could have given no name, Lionel
Caryll stood mute; the great tears slowly coursing
down his cheeks, his bright and gracious youth sorely
shattered and stricken ; yet even in all the bitterness
of his own despair, vaguely conscious that he was in
the presence of some grief beside which his own was
dwarfed. For a moment there was a dead silence ;
then in that moment, the proud man gathered back
his strength, the statesman resumed the armour of ice
which he wore with friend and foe. Strathmore rose ;
he dreaded lest he had betrayed his secret ; but his
face, though haggard and dark with the traces of a
deadly conflict, was calm.
" There are reasons, in my past, why the thought
VOL. III. I
114 STEATHMOEE.
of marriage is painful, almost impossible," he said,
slowly, and with forced effort. " And and why
should you urge this upon me ? You have confessed
you love her?"
The young man raised his heavy eyes :
" It is because I love her that I would know her
peace secured, though its security left me only the
more desolate."
The answer was proud and touching in its sad
simj^licity; it went to the heart of him who heard
it; Strathmore leaned his hand heavily upon his
shoulder.
" Lionel Caryll, you are nobler than / ever was !"
The youth's lips quivered, and he moved with a
quick shudder ; he had pleaded against every selfish
dictate of passion for Lucille's sake, but he shrank
from the touch of the hand she loved.
" My lord, you will forgive me if I leave your roof
to-night. I could not stay now that that "
His voice failed him, and he turned his head with
a quick gesture, that Strathmore might not see the
tears which choked his utterance ; but Strathmore's
hand was not shaken from its hold, and his words
were gentle strangely gentle for him :
"As you will. But, ere you go, remember, for
your tenderness to her, you shall still ask of me
what you choose, and there shall be nothing that I
will refuse. Think of me as your best friend ; your
future shall be my care."
THE CHOICE THAT WAS LEFT. 115
The 'young man gave liim one swift heart-broken
look; ^"the future!" to him it looked beggared for
all time. Then his hand closed on the one held to
him in a convulsive pressure, the dull echo of the
closing door vibrated through the silence, and Strath-
more was once more alone.
In solitude, beside which his nephew's fresh guilt-
less grief, even in all its poignancy, was mercy. He
must of his own hand deal to her the deadliest blow
that could smite her life ; or he must seek her as a
husband, hiding for ever the death-stain upon the
heart on which she would be cherished !
The words that the youth had uttered, the lovely
light wdiich he had beheld on her face as he drew
near these w^ere his tempters, his torturers. He
could have bidden his own life suffer and be silent to
his grave ; but hers ! Too well he knew the truth,
that never would that nature " love tioice;^'' that
never for another would dawn and smile that beau-
tifid gladness which, through him, must be changed
to a curse. He knew it he knew it. As he had
destroyed her mother's life in the morning of its
youth, in the sweetness of its joy, so he must now
destroy hers.
They stretched before him; that terrible, lonely love-
less course of years through which she, the soft and
fragile child steeped in sunlight and sheltered in
tenderness, would be condemned to pass. Could he
send her to them? Could he leave her to believe
i2
116 STEATHMORE.
that she was barred from out his pity? Could he
bid her be taught, that he, who had sheltered her
with more than a father's care, was cold, and brutal,
and dead to the holy love he had fostered ? Yet
breathe in her ear the whispers of love, seek her lips
with a bridal caress, gather her to a husband's heart
in her soft dreaming sleep ! he could not, he who
knew himself the slayer of more than one human
life.
117
CHAPTER VII.
IN THE CABIN BY THE SEA.
The gloom deepened in Strathmore's solitary
chamber; the joyless autumn twilight stole over
wood and moorland ; the shadows grew more sombre :
still he sat there, his head sunk, his strength broken.
Of what avail were pride, will, power, iron force, and
haughty dominance here 2 They could not shield the
innocent from the curse that fell upon her from his
crime ; they could not compel the expiation which he
had vowed the dead ; they could not assoil his life and
render it purified and free to seek the sinless.
Hours had passed ; he had not raised his head, nor
moved, when suddenly he knew not what it was
there stole over him with a chill sickening shudder a
sense as of a presence felt but unseen, which froze his
blood and made him start, and lift his head and
look outward to the twilight. And his eyes fastened
118 STRATHMORE.
there with a blank, distended gaze ; a great horror
came upon his face ; in the sickly autumn mist, in
the black shroud of the leaves without, he saw the
features which he had seen, ghastly and livid in the
phosphor glare, swept downwards to death beneath
the waters.
Had the sea given up its dead ?
His veins were ice ; on his brow the dew gathered
thick and cold ; terror like a hand of steel gripped his
heart, stilling its beating life; while up from the
darkness, through the white cerecloths of mists, rose
the form of his Temptress, until he saw her face
with its grey blanched hue of haunting pain, and
its amber hair driven by the autumn winds, and
the eyes with their remorseless, cruel, thirsting hate,
claiming him still her own her own by right of
their companion guilt ; her own by title of their e\dl
past.
He gazed out into the falling night, his limbs
powerless, his voice paralysed, his lips cloven, while
the spectral shape grew whiter and whiter, clearer and
clearer, in the stormy air, and he saw her as he had
done when his hand had unclosed and left her to
perish, bidding her die the death that she had
given.
They looked on one another thus, under the shadow
of White Ladies ; one moment, one fleeting second,
that to both seemed lifelong then the phantom
faded, lost in the dull gloom, while the sough of
IN THE CABIN BY THE SEA. 119
the leaves swept alone through the silence : and he
trembled in every limb, and quivered as after a blow
that had felled him to the earth. The ice grip loos-
ened from his heart, the awe of an uneartly horror
unfroze its hold ; and he thanked God aloud, as one
released from doom, and led back to life by a gentle
and compassionate hand.
For he knew that the sea had given up not the
dead but the living ; and that he was freed from the
guilt which had risen from the depths of the ocean,
and tempted him. Not wholly freed, for crime lies
in intentj and is not washed away, because a merciful
fate baffles its committal and its consummation. Yet,
freed in much ; and humbled in far more.
The face that he had seen in the yellow weirdly
gloom was before him still ; still he felt as though it
stole nigh, and breathed around him the presence of
the temptress, the traitress, the assassinatress. Fierce
and deadly, evil hatred, burning passions, had leapt
swift as flame into life, when in the tumult of the
storm he had been face to face for the first time,
since he had bidden her go reap the whirlmnd she
had sown, with the woman who had been his de-
stroyer, and who had been driven out to misery and
shame by the flail of his vengeance. But now, in the
sudden release from crime, in the chastened awe of
stricken pride, freed from a fresh sin through the
wild and wayward mercy of the waves, these were not
120 STRATHMORE.
on him. These for once were drowned and stilled.
Truly had she said to him, in the years gone by,
" If / sinned, were you guiltless ? " And, strangely,
as all things are strange in human life, with the sight
of the woman who had betrayed him, there came upon
him again the agony of that sweet, idolatrous love, the
impotent regret for all that lay buried in his youth,
never to be known again never to have resurrection
or successor. It was dead dead for ever; and the
great tears forced slowly from his eyes, and his head
sunk lower and lower on his arms. If that love had
been guiltless, if that beautiful lie had been worthy
the worship, in what living warmth and light would
have been bathed the life of the man whose god was
Power, and whose tyrant was Remorse !
Through long hours he lay there with his head on
his arms, as in the sleep of a profound exhaustion ; it
was the sleep of the soul, though not of the body,
worn out with crime, with conflict, and lulled to rest
through sheer weariness of misery. Then, after a
while, he rose, and his steps ceaselessly paced his
chamber, as though he trod , down the memories that
thronged around him, the passions that uncoiled
from the past and claimed him for their own, the
warring duties, the severed thoughts of the dead, and
of the living, that tore him asunder as the wild horses
tore the quivering limbs of the condemned. Across
him for one moment glanced a thought that seemed
IN THE CABIN BY THE SEA. 121
to scorcli liim like the physical touch of fire, making
him shrink ere it was grasped. The fresh sin,
hidden from the sight of men and buried in the
secresy of the seas, was not upon him to bar him from
the touch, the tenderness, the presence of the youth
that was pm-e and without soil ; for the dead years
gone, had not atonement been striven for which might
avail to wash out tliatj without the martyrdom and
sacrifice of the life that was both innocent, and un-
conscious of that brutal past ?
Lucille loved him: what if He shuddered
from the thought and flung it from him, as though
in its very sweetness it were added crime ; cast it
away with the same revulsion, almost horror, with
which he had first heard its suggestion in the summer
evening from his nephew. He wed her I Now, when,
for the first time, the thought of its possibility came
over him, it looked tenfold more forbidden and un-
holy than it had ever done when he had refused to
glance at it for an instant, when he had had no
knowledge that her love was his, no imagination that
it would ever become so. With newly committed
crime upon his soul, he had known that never could
their lives ever have bond between them ; now that
he stood freed from this, he had seemed for one
instant nearer to her, for one moment he had thought
that he might guard in his own bosom that fairy
youth, that sacred innocence, that beautiful dawn of
purest love, f ulfilhng, till death should take him, the
122 STEATHMOEE.
trust which ErroU gave ; for one instant his heart had
gone out with a pang of passionate yearning, a thirst
of unutterable longing, to lock her close into his
life, where none could ever assail her, and to make
her his alone for ever, beyond the touch of evil
or the accident of fate. But with its very thought,
came the memory of all that severed them, making in
the knowledge of his own sin divorce more wide than
law could frame, divorce against which there was in
his own conscience, no appeal.
He wed her !
He shuddered at the darkness and sin his life had
known. Could he, more utterly condemned in his
own sio[ht than anv felon that ever stained the earth,
approach her with a husband's love ? he, who held
from her in lifelong secresy the tragedy of her father's
death, bid her lie on his heart in the soft stillness of
the night, and give him the dearest name that men
can claim from sinless lips like hers? The more
because now his own desire pleaded for it, his own
peace sickened for it, his own love longed for it, did
the mere hope, the mere thought strike him as with
the horror of crime, as with the shock of blasphemy.
He become her lover, her husband ! It would be
impious to the sanctity of the dead; impious to the
innocence of the living !
He went out into the still late night, alone, when
no eyes were on him, and the earth lay hushed and
darkened as a grave. His steps wore their track in
IN THE CABIN BY THE SEA. 123
the damp grasses as lie walked unceasingly on and on,
to and fro, under the gloom of the woods, withm the
sound of the moaning seas. All the misery of his life
seemed to fall short of this : she loved him : his own
heart recognised it, other lips had said it ; she loved
him; and he had no choice left, save to give her
up to a solitary and unpitied desolation, or to do
what his soul revolted, and shrank from, a thousand
times the more because the answering love in him
craved for it, and self-pity pleaded for it with a pas-
sionate pain that he stifled as some vile infamy to-
wards the dead and her. Where question had arisen
of sacrifice of himself to her, he had known no
temptation, no hesitation, no struggle ; he would
have given his life for her, and would have doomed
himself mthout a thought of pity to an eternity of
woe to have saved her a single pang. But here
sparing her, he spared himself ; or, thrusting back
the temptation that coiled about him, and accepting
the just chastisement of his past, he must sacrifice
with him all her life, and through himself, destroy
what he had sworn to cherish !
A young poet once wrote :
" If sorrow could be won by gifts to barter prey for prey,
There is an arm would wither, so thine revived might be,
A lip which would be still and mute to make thy music free,
An eye which would forget to wake to bid thy morning shine,
A heart whose very strings would break, to take one pang of
thine."
Strathmore, no poet, and to whom the gentleness
of self-sacrifice was by nature alien, felt not less than
124 STEATHMOEE.
this in all its absolute self-negation, in all its passionate
tenderness and fidelity to the only one that he had
ever purely loved, to the only trust bequeathed him
by his friend. And now he could alone spare her,
by binding with his own the life that every memory
of the past, and every law of conscience forbade
from him, and banned from his very touch ! Which
choice could he make ?
To the man whose path even through guilt had
been firm and incisive, as though cut with steel
through wax, who had never hesitated, who had
never doubted as to his own course, or to his own
resolve, an agony of indecision was the worst tor-
ture life could hold. Whatever he had suffered, he
had never before endured this ; his will, however
erring, had been resolute and prompt to act, as the
will of a tyrant ; and this helplessness of doubt, this
conflict of opposing duties, this struggle in which he
could see no light save from one path that he dared
not follow, was greater anguish to a nature like
Strathmore's, than any clear shape of action could
ever have been, even though it had taken him to
a martyrdom.
Do what he would, it seemed to him that he must
each way sin to her and to her father ; whether he
left her and let her fair youth consume in the bitter-
ness and shame of an unanswered love, or whether he
crushed the past down out of sight and memory,
and took her in his heart and in his home
his wife; whichever he chose he thought that guilt
IN THE CABIN BY THE SEA. 125
must lie upon his choice. With the one he must
break for ever his loyalty to the trust he held, and
lose for ever his only expiation to the dead ; with the
other he must woo her to a union that seemed to him
an outrage against her innocence, a forbidden unholy
treachery that would betray her in her unconscious-
ness into the arms of her father's destroyer. Do
what he would darkness and crime seemed to rest on
it ; and all he had done turned into evil. All
gentler things, all nobler effort, in him had been
vain ; and out of his fealty to the dead man's trust
came the doom that wrecked it. His tenderness for
her had been pure and unsullied, the holiest thing his
heart had ever known ; yet even the fruit of that was
evil. Unwitting what he did, he had taught her a
love that he would have died rather than waken !
With every caress, every gentle word, every unre-
mitting care, given her for her father's sake, he had
in cruel unconsciousness sown the seeds of a misery
he had never dreamed as possible. Was there none
in the wide world for her to love but the criminal
whom a brutal past divided from her ?
And yet and yet who would ever cherish as he
would cherish her !
All through the autumn night, till the dawn broke
greyly over the dusky seas, he walked alone with
steps that wore a weary track through dank grasses
and on heavy sands; and the day broke and found
him no nearer to his choice, no better able to meet
and vanquish the fate that had suddenly risen up
126 STEATHMOEE.
from the ashes of his dead sin, and mocked his dreams
of redemption by seizing the piire life he guarded,
and flinging it out to misery with his own.
*******
In tlie Httle hamlet that nestled above the sea on
the borders of the great forests of White Ladies, and
in the dip of one of the wild western valleys, stood a
shealing, scarce wind and water proof, with the blasts
of the early autumn moaning through its time-
browned thatch, and the pomp of the autumn foliage
sheltering its rotten timbers in a wealth of reddening
gold. Those who made their home there were very
poor, a woman old and feeble and her grandson who
was yet but a child ; still in their poverty they would
break half their last crust for one poorer still, and
such as their roof was would share it.
When the sun had risen after the night-storm, and
high upon the beach were washed black drift-wood
and broken wealth, and nameless sightless corpses that
the fish had spared, they had* found one woman tossed
by the mad mercy of the waves in safety on the
beach, and living still by one faint scarce-felt pulse of
life. They had raised her, and brought and lain her
gently on the heap of hay that served them as a bed,
and, though she was poorer yet than they, since the seas
had only left her this flickering remnant of uncertain
life, and robbed her of all else, they did their best for
her, and served her as they could, with that most
touching charity of all the charity of want to
wretchedness.
IN THE CABIN BY THE SEA. 127
Here, on the pallet of dry grasses she lay ; the
woman who once had slept in the palaces of kings.
Broken, bruised, stricken, having lost almost all
likeness of herself, delirious, though she kept even in
fever the secrets of her past, with something still of
lingering matchless beauty that would not perish ;
beauty even yet in the voice that murmured wild
words, in the hair flung in wild disorder, heavy with
brine and tangled with black weeds, in the hand
which closed on the dry hay with unconscious pain,
in the eyes which never could utterly lose their
lustre. She was still living, she who would have
thought death a thousand-fold gentler than life, yet
who had shrunk from it when it was near, with the
cowardice of a criminal, and the physical terror of
womanhood. Living in such last depths of woe,
that she owed the cold water held to her lips, and the
wretched bed on which her aching limbs were
stretched, to the charity of the lowest and the poorest
hirelings of the man who once had been her slave.
He had bidden her live to suffer and retribution
had di'iven and scourged her into obedience to the
uttermost letter of that brutal Mosaic Law.
The woman and the boy who tended her, one in
extreme age, the other a young child, did their best
for her, but they feared her and shrunk from her,
they could not have told why. About her there still
remained something of inalienable grace, of patrician
haughty majesty, and on her in vague yet awful
shape, that they rather felt than saw, guilt had left
128 STRATHMOEE.
its seal, and shameful years their trail. Long ago, the
cruelty and crime within her had flashed out even in
her young soft dazzling beauty; now they reigned
alone, and gave her a terror to the simple peasants
who gathered round her. Yet they did their best ;
and when the night before, being unwatched, she had
risen, and wandering in the mechanical action of
delirium, had dragged her weak, bruised limbs
through brake and woodland, and wide grassland and
dense thickets, till she had crossed the park of White
Ladies, and gazed vacantly through the windows of
the Abbey in the dull mists of falling night, they had
followed her and found her lying senseless and ex-
hausted among the dank yellow ferns, and had brought
her back in redoubled pity to such shelter as they
could give.
There she lay now in the risen day, insensible still,
and moaning wearily, with strange pathetic murmurs
now and again upon her lips, and eyes wide open to
the light with a blind gaze that looked out upon the
earth where she had now no place, and on the sun-
light which now to her could never be but mockery
and pain. The broken rafters yawned above her,
while through them poured the chilly autumn winds ;
the air was heavy with the lowering smoke of a low
peat fire burning on the hearth; the pile of sear
grasses and straw was beneath the form once beautiful
as a dream of Phidias ; squalor, misery, darkness,
were around her, and in that wretched cabin by the
sea lay the woman who once had bowed monarchs to
IN THE CABIN BY THE SEA. 129
her smile, and swayed a sceptre wider than sovereign's
own. Suffer as she would, her suffering could never
yet be so great as her sin had been.
Without, the noon was at its height, and the
glancing waters stretched serene and bright ; within,
even the day could lend no fairness to the den
where human hves lived in penury that made the
kennelled hounds of White Ladies seem lapped in
luxury. The old peasant rocked herself before the
labouring smoke of the damp fire ; a broken pitcher
of cold water stood beside the pallet where she had
let a stranger lie ; the place was black, and close, and
noisome.
Suddenly, and softly, the door opened, the fresh-
ness of the mellow autumn day flooded the cabin floor,
on the threshold stood, like a child-angel that gleams
out in all its golden glory from the dark backgrounds
of old altar pictures, the bright youth of Lucille.
To those wdiom the wreck had flung homeless and
beggared on the shores of White Ladies, she seemed
like such a spirit, bringing balm, and healing, and
hope, coming to their bereaved and desolate lives
with her fair young face and her loving, exhaustless
charity, which from her earliest years had known no
happiness so great as to give succour to suffering,
and had found compassion for the vilest, " driving
awav all thine^s of sin and o;uilt" bv its own divine
I/O O 1/
unconsciousness of their shame and danger.
lAicille's life was love ; for all who suffered with
that suffering whose shadows she had never felt, for
VOL. III. K
130 STEATHMOEE.
all who sinned witli that sin whose meaning she had
nev^er known. Earth was so beautiful to her, and
the smile of God so near her, that her heart ached for
those who dwelt in pain, and who denied his love.
She longed to make them as herself ; she longed to
lead them where she knelt.
Alone, leaving her attendants without, she came
into the dark and wretched shealing. She had heard
from the boy without, that a shipwrecked stranger
lay there ill and delirious. Lucille had her father's
nature ; Avith all her soft brightness and her child-
like delicacy she had a high courage, and an un-
selfishness as rare as it was elevated. She never had
known fear. And she came now into this pent hovel
came to serve and succour the outcast lying there.
In the dusky smoke-thickened air, she stooped, as
the old peasant rose to her in reverence and wonder,
and shook into her lap a bright shower of silver;
wealth Strathmore lavished on her, and it ever went
to those who were in want. She gave, too, with that
generous grace which took all sting from any alms,
and made those whom she relieved not her debtors,
but her idolators ; she gave her charity as widely,
and as unconsciously of merit in the gift, as a flower
gives its fragrance. Then, while her words still lin-
gered on the woman's ear like some gentle chime of
music, she swept with hushed steps towards the dark
corner where the strewn grasses were tossed down,
and where, on that miserable bed, with sightless eyes
and fevered limbs, and lips that murmured wearily
J
IN THE CABIN BY THE SEA. 131
words witliout meaning, Marion Yavasonr, homeless
and nameless, lay.
They were together ; the innocent and the guilty
life ; and with the infinite compassion of her youth,
Lucille looked down upon her father's murderess,
lying there at her feet in darkness and wi'etched-
ness, where the rays of the sun did not enter, and
the autumn winds made their dull moan about her.
Thus they met at last.
" Ah ! how she suffers !"
The soft words stole, wistful as a sigh, from her
lips, as she gazed down on the bruised, shattered,
destroyed beauty which yet ims beauty, and survived
the wreck of all else in this lost womanhood, this
doomed and accursed life. She suffered I the eyes
burning but w^ithout light, the lips that moved with
senseless words, the weary pain of limbs that could
find no rest, and brain that could know no sleep,
in these she suffered with every breath she drew.
And beyond these there was a darker, direr suffering
still; wdiere the wild thoughts wandered, was over
the course of an evil life ; where the blind memories
w^ent, was into depths of guilt. Sin is sweet in the
noon of its power ; but it is terrible beyond all terror
in the midnight shadow of the grave. And its re-
flection fell on Lucille with a va^^ue dread ; in her
young and carefully-guarded life she had never seen
the look that she saw now on the face of the woman
before her ; that wreck of ruined beauty, that un-
conscious ^^'iId defiance, that lost and broken gran-
k2
132 STEATHMOEE.
denr wliicli gleamed still tlirougli all the darkness of
evil and of sliame. She had never seen it ; it had
awe and fear for her, all strange and nameless as it
was, yet her first instinct was that of the infinite
pity which could shrink from nothing that was human,
and could be denied to nothing that was in misery.
She sank do^vn, kneeling beside the wretched bed
with all the grace of her own loveliness, all the
gentleness of her own nature; and with a musing
joain in her eyes gazed down at the woman to whom
she had owed the deadliest wrong of all her life,
before her life had known its loss. Her heart was
heavy with its own first bitterness, with a weary
aching sadness that hardly yet knew its own spring ;
life seemed unclosing about her in all its hidden
mysteries, its solemnity of pain ; and in the insen-
sible anguish on which she looked, she seemed to see,
as by some sudden revelation, how terrible this world
could be, which to her, until so late, had been one
sunny Eden of eternal summer. She touched, with
lingering caress, the amber tresses that were tangled
with the brown rough grasses of the bed ; she laid
her hand with cooling perfumes on the brow that
burned like fire beneath it ; she bent over her with
pitying words, whose melody insensibly soothed and
silenced the moanins^ wandering murmurs on the
parched lips. Unconscious what she did, she brought
her compassion, her tenderness, her angel ministra-
tion, to the assassinatress by whose lie her father
perished. And there, in the deep shadow of the
i
IN THE CABIN BY THE SEA. 133
leaning rotten roof, she knelt beside lier ; her yonth,
her innocence, her fair ethereal life, beside the bruised,
stricken, guilt-steeped outcast, who owed a stoup of
water to a beggar's alms.
The day had risen and become noon. Strathmore,
who could find no rest, was up, after a few brief sleepless
hours on his bed, walking still, scarce conscious where
he went, alone in the wild forests and solitary shores
of White Ladies. No nearer to his resolve, no closer
to decision between the divided duties that had their
conflict in him the duty which bade him guard her
life without a cloud, the duty which forbade him
to make that life one with his. Choose which he
would, he must err to the dead and to her ; which
error would be the less ? That he himself loved, that
he himself longed to have the sweetness of her young
lips, the love-smile of lier eyes, the keeping of her
peace and joy, he let weigh nothing in the scale. A
haughty egotism had once too entirely ruled him ;
but now he would have crucified every thought of
self with an unswerving martyrdom, and thrust his
own remaining years into any depths of woe, if by so
doing he could have saved or aided her.
He did not know how the hours had passed ; he
did not remember how his absence would be noted,
since men who have the triumph of eminence, can
never have the luxury of solitude. He walked on
and on, feeling . a strange relief in that ceaseless
movement, in that physical exhaustion.
134 STEATHMOEE.
Which must he choose ? the betrayal of his trust
in consigning her life to sorrow ; or the betrayal of
her innocence in wedding her, with the past stifled
and buried from her ?
Either seemed equally accursed to him.
Wandering without aim, almost without knowledge,
he came to where the sea-side cabin stood, with the
sound of the waves under the cliffs below, and the
great woods locking it in their depths. The group
about it fell back at his approach ; he looked at them
with surprise, recognising those who specially attended
her.
" Why are you here ? "
" Mademoiselle Lucille is within, my lord."
"Within? ^Aere?"
lie laid his hand upon the door and pushed it
open. For a moment all was hazy and dim before
him, coming from the full and mellow lifijht into the
darkened shed ; then the leaden clouds of smoke
seemed to roll back, and beyond them he saw, kneel-
ing there in the gloom, the bright child wdio was
the fitting minister of a godlike compassion, beside
the bed on which the homeless exile lay. A sickness
of horror came upon him; the darkness whirled
before his sight ; dizzy, breathless, stunned, he leaned
nearer, gazing on them in the blankness of a ghastly
fascination : one glance, and he had known the face
of his destroyer.
And he saw them together ! he saw Lucille beside
IN THE CABIN BY THE SEA. 135
the woman \y1io had tempted him to his crime,
and had been, more yet than he, the assassin of her
father !
Life seemed to have held no retribution for him
until now. Remorse, remorse ! where was its use ?
It was vain as to seek back the dead from their
tomb, since his guilt could follow him thus !
Pie looked on them together, the life of cruelty
and sm, beside the soilless youth, pure as the flowers
that opened to the dawn ; lie met the senseless, blind
gaze of the eyes in which his heaven once had shone ;
he saw Lucille, kneeling before that bed of shame,
with a prayer upon her young lips a prayer of pity I
and on her face the light of a beautiful mercy, of an
exhaustless love. In all the width of the crowded
world must these meet ! One moment, while his gaze
fastened there, in what appeared to him an eternity of
dim, unutterable horror; in wdiich he saw them in
that dark and wretched place across the rolKng smoke,
that seemed like the pestilential breath of his dead
years rising round the innocence of Lucille to de-
stroy her for ever ; one moment, in which a hideous
unreality possessed him, and the burning eyes of the
woman he had loved s^azed without sio;ht or sense in
his; then, with an unconscious gesture, an uncon-
scious cry, like that in which he had once before an-
swered her love and betrayed his own, he stretched
out his arms.
^^.ucille! Lucille I"
136 STRATIIMOEE.
She looked up, rose, and sprang towards him with
the fond instinct of her childhood, stronger in that
moment of surprise than the estranged pain which was
between them. Not knowing what he did, or who
beheld him, he pressed her to his breast with uncon-
scious passion, and drew her into his arms, away from
that bed of misery, away from the senseless gaze of
those haunting eyes.
" My God ! what brought you here ? ^what mad-
ness sent you to this accursed place ? You
you "
There was a janing violence in his voice, a pas-
sionate force in the embrace which closed on her, that
he was insensible of, that she felt with startled, wistful
awe, half gladness and half fear ; her heart shrank
from it, and yet knew that this was greater love
than the gentleness which she had always known.
The doubting, wondering look of her lifted eyes, the
instinctive movement with which she drew herself
from his arms, wakened him to the knowledge of
what he did, of what he said ; to the memory of how
his own words might betray him, of how, before all,
above all, she must be spared. In the presence of
Marion Yavasour his hand had no right even to touch
her own ! In that moment he could have flung himself
down at her feet, and told her all, bidding her hate
him, revile him, lay what vengeance and what misery
she would on him, so that only there were no secret
between them, so that only she forgave him as her
father had forgiven !
IN THE CABIN BY THE SEA. 137
He loosed her from him, and his voice was broken
and indistinct, while he dared not look upon her face,
he dared not meet her eyes, though still he forced her
out farther from that place, and nearer towards the
pure day.
" I startled you forgive me ! This is no place for
you ; there is danger here, and evil," he murmured,
incoherently. " Come come ! Do you hear me ?
Come ! You are too young for these dens of vileness !"
" They are only very poor ? " she pleaded, softly,
while her own words were tremulous, and her heart
seemed stirred with the passion that for one moment
had vibrated with such force in his. ^'The people
knov^ ihe well and and she suffers so much ; let
me stay with her a little while ?"
He shivered under the gentle words which pleaded
with such pity for the outcast lying there. He took
her hands one moment and pressed them against his
heart, that beat beneath them with loud laboured
throbs.
" Oh, my love, my child I your life is too fair to
be near mine or hers or any that sin has
touched ! You are pure as the angels ; and ive !
Come, for the mercy of Heaven, come ! / bid you ! "
A deep flush came on her face, her eyes looked at
him wistfully, her lips trembled slightly ; vaguely and
sweetly, yet with something of pain and fear, she
felt that the love which spoke now in his words was
another than that which had sheltered her child-
hood. His \n\l was her law, and with one pitying,
138 STEATHMORE.
lingering, backward glance to where the nameless
stranger lay, she went with him, and was borne out by
him into the tranquil noon, into the silence of the soli-
tary w^oods. He knew nothing that he did ; he had
one instinct only, to force her from that presence as
from some pestilential place, to carry her far away
down to the fresh waters, into the depths of the fresh
forests, anywhere anywhere from the search of
that burning gaze, from the breath of that destroying
life!
She did no* move, she did not speak ; once she
looked upward at him with dark di-eaming eyes ; that
was all ; a strange solemnity, half of awe, half of
terror, yet sweet beyond all words, seemed to thrill
through all her life. She heard the quick, loud
beatings of his heart ; she felt herself borne on and
on by his hand, as if by invisible wings, in silence
through the bright sun-lightened forest aisles ; alone
with him, while the stillness of the great woods were
round them, and beyond the glorious freedom of the
sea' lay flashing in the light.
His arms closed on her as though in their strength to
hold her back from the vileness of the past that rose
to smite her, his head drooped over her while hot tears
fell upon the brightness of her brow, his eyes looked
down with a yearning anguish into hers. All his
life longed for her ; and yet love between them !
Love while her father's splendour of manhood had
fallen by his hand, and there, beyond the reddened
IN THE CABIN BY THE SEA. 139
wood, still lived the temptress and companion of his
sin ! He shuddered at it, he shrank from it as from
fresh crime ; yet his arms drew her nearer to him ;
his breath was on her cheek ; the moment's instinct
was stronger than himself, it shattered every other
thought aside, and drove him on unconscious what
he did, while all his heart went out to her in pas-
sionate pain :
" Oh, Lucille ! my child ! my treasure ! my angel !
my lips are not fit for yours ; my life is not meet for
yours, and yet Oh, God ! ^I love you ! "
Her face grew white, he felt her tremble in his
hold, she quivered like a delicate animal under
a blow, and her eyes glanced up to him with a
swift appealing glance, with all the deep and
dreamy wonder of a heart freshly startled to its
own knowledge. He pressed her closer yet in his
embrace :
" My love you have ever had ; but another love,
Lucille ; the love of a husband for the life that is
dearest to him on earth ^"
His voice, broken into indistinctness, spoke more of
tenderness than words can ever hold, and as she
heard it, over her brow came a deep changing flush, a
soft tremulous light, her lips parted Avith a quick sigh ;
a glory touched her life, in which the golden world
of sea and sunlight reeled before her sight; her
eyes sought his in one fleeting look, and his lips
met her own in the kiss which they had never given,
140 STEATHMOEE.
often as tliey had rested there; the kiss of love.
The choice was made ; her life was his for ever.
And there, at her feet, minoted beneath the tangled
grasses and the ivy-coils of the sea-shore, lay one for-
gotten grave, with the leaves covering the solitary
word of record
'' lucillc."
Even while the gladness of morning glanced on
the serenity of the waters, and on his own lips was
the soft warmth of her first caress, a sudden icy
chillness swept through all his veins, and he di'ew her
with a passionate gesture closer to his bosom, farther
into the forest solitudes. Their first love-words had
been uttered by her mother's grave !
141
CHAPTER VIIT.
" 1ST AUCH DIESS EIN IRETHUM SO SCHONT MICH
IHR KLEIGEREN GOTTER."
When the night had fallen with its grey gloom of
twilight, a shadow came towards the threshold of the
cabin by the sea.
The hut was forsaken ; the low peat fire burned
dully on the hearth, casting a dusky, fitful gleam ;
on the pallet in the darkened corner the name-
less wanderer lay, in blindness, in stupor, in fever-
ish," restless pain. There was not a dog to watch
her sleep, or to grieve for her now; for her for
whom once sovereigns had waited, by whom human
love had once been gained and spent, and broken,
idly and cruelly as a child wastes king-cups in a
summer's day.
The shadow crossed the threshold, and the bare
mud floor, and came towards her bed in the sullen
crimson light ; Strathmore stood and looked on her
again, drawn there by a force he had no power to resist
the force that makes men their own accusers and
142 STILVTIIMOEE.
avengers. He was alonCj and slie lay stretched
unconscious at liis feet.
Once he had said that vengeance had a sweetness
which none could ever steal ; now he knew that it
may bring in its fruition, a pang as deadly for him
that strikes, as for the stricken.
His eyes dwelt on her one moment in a long shud- ;
dering gaze, this life that was his own crime, incar- )
nate, and ever pursuing him. \
Was this the loveliness which had seemed immortal i
in its deathless splendour? Past him there floated, ;
as in a dream, all the dazzling hours of her youth i
and his. The woman he had loved was dead ; dead j
long years ago in the grave Avliere their youth ;
lay. This was not she ; no more than the yellow ;
faded leaf that, scentless and -withered, is trodden in j
the dust and drifted down the wind, is the rose that |
yesterday swung in the light of palace-gardens ! No [
more no less !
He stood and looked on her under the black lean- '
ing roof of the hovel, while the sullen blasts poured \
down through the broken thatch, and the dull flame i
threw a weird flickering flash over the bed of straw :
and rough sand grasses. Those who have seen what j
they have cherished lie still and peaceful in the calm i
of death, have knoT^Ti an anguish that is mercy beside !
what he knew now. For he had loved her ; w^ith a i
love that would have given his very life for hers un- I
grudgingly ; a love that now, in all its cheated crime- :
stained hate, still lived in passionate, hungered misery i
for all it once had been ! \
ETC. 143
His vengeance liad made her what she now was,
and now, beholding it, he suffered in it as much as
she. That sun-crowaied glory of his past ! it w^as
gone for ever ; gone like the bloom from these white
lips of pain, for wdiose kiss he once had staked his
soul ; like the lustre from these dull tangled tresses,
w^hose golden light had once made all his w^orld;
like the empire from this ruined life, whose beauty
lay before him bruised, shattered, torn, and perished
for ever more. And a great agony came on him,
miglitier than vengeance, vaster than hatred, deep
as remorse. He had loved her as never now could
he love again he had loved her, paying down the
peace and guiltlessness of his whole life at her word.
And freshly, as though dealt but yesterday, the blow
of her faithlessness smote him ; he could not look on
her; he could not breathe near her; he staggered
from her where she lay, and felt his way blindly and
feebly out into the evening air down into the core of
the woods, where no eyes beheld him ; down to
the silent shores, wdiere no step came, and the grey
sea stretched in solitude.
He had thought his strength as iron, and it was
weaker than the reed. He had thouo-ht to mould
fate like deity; and an outcast's life, saved by the
wanton caprice of the waters, rose in his path inexor-
able as destiny.
Hours later on he returned to White Ladies by
the side-door of the western wing. His step was
slow, his proud head stooped and bent. Strathmore,
144 STRATHMOEE.
to whose nature defeat liad once seemed impossible,
was vanquished, broken, netted in, in the meshes of
his own past acts ; and while an innocent life loved
him and was pledged to his, the darkness of his own
left him no fitness for its pure presence.
Marion Yavasour was once more in his fate ; so
near him that his own peasants sheltered her, that the
woods of his own lands shut in the wretched shed
where she was harboured. And he could do no-
thing; he could not thrust her out from the beg-
gars' charity she was given ; he could not drive her
from his home, and forbid those who succoured her
to give her the pile of straw and cup of water that
alone kept existence in her. Lord here though he
was, and free to command what he would, he could
not exile an outcast from the cabin of the poorest
that lived upon his land! His hands were bound.
She must haunt him as she would there was no
refuge. One thought alone remained to him. Lu-
cille must leave him ; she must not stay where the
murderess of her father had once been in her sight,
had once been pitied by her tender charity ! What
he had said to her, even in its sweetness, even in its
first soft and forgetful moments, weighed heavily on
him, with a sense as of evil committed, of danger
drawn down on her. What right had he to her love ?
What right had he to have bound her life with his ?
Fear, misery, the instinct to save her from her father's
destroyer, and a resistless longing impulse to tell her
how he loved her, and take her to his heart to shield
" 1ST AUCH DIESS EIN lEETHUM," ETC. 145
her there for ever, had hurried hmi in one uncoii-
scions instant into what had all the day through
what even still seemed to him a sin and an impiety
against the dead and her. The die was cast ; yet
none the less did the gain of her love seem crime in
him, did the future that must unite their lives seem
darkened and forbidden.
As his steps wearily paced the length of the long
corridors, at a distance he saw her, alone in the con-
servatories, lying under the clusters of oriental foliage,
with the great palm-leaves drooped above her, and the
brilliancy of autumn flowers clustering at her feet.
The white light shone on her, and on the careless
grace, the dreaming joy, the abandoned happiness,
the childlike rest of her repose, pure and without a
shade ; happiness so deep and new that it still trembled
at itself, was still told in all her attitude, in the very
droop of the lashes over her musing eyes, in the very
smile that lingered on her parted lips, in the very flush
that even in solitude was bright upon her cheek.
He had erred ? Surely not, since she was happy
through him ?
As he approached, she started and raised her head ;
the light which would never dawn there save for him
chased the thoughtf ulness from her eyes ; the colour
deepened in her face; she sprang up, then paused
with the wild, shy, delicate grace of the deer in that
moment she was so exquisitely fair ! Doom to grief
and loneliness that fairy child in the years of her
earliest youth ? It would have been as brutal as to
VOL. III. L
146 STEATHMORE.
stifle the young bird in tlie first music of its song, as
to slay with a blow the trusting fawTi as it looked up
with earnest, lustrous gaze, and caressed the hand it
followed !
He stretched out his arms to her, and forgot all
save that her life was his to treasure and to guard :
" Oh ! my child, my love, my darling ! God send
that all pain falls on me; that none comes to thee
through my love ! "
With his accustomed measured step, Strathmore
crossed the great length of the withdrawing-room,
and approached the place where his mother sat
alone ; she looked up, and as the light fell upon his
face, she saw a change on it, a great softness that
changed its melancholy and its resolve.
Her thoughts were weary, the farewell of her
young grandson had filled them with his grief; but
in the presence of Strathmore she ceased to re-
member the sorrow, bitter but innocent, of youth,
and a sudden fear fell on her: that look upon his
face told her much.
Her son stood before her, and his words were very
brief :
" Mother, let the past be buried for ever. Lucille
will be my wife."
" Yours I "
"Yes. Why not? Why not?"
His voice was defiant, almost fierce, as though!
challenging the power which should dispute his wiU |
and sever them.
" 1ST AUOH DIESS EIN lEETHUM," ETC. 147
" Why ? You ask that, Cecil ? "
She had risen, and fronted him; in her eyes the
pitilessness which he had inherited with her blood,
on her face the coldness which in her earlier years
had been unchastened and nnsoftened.
The words struck Strathmore keenly as a knife ;
his head bowed, his lips quivered this man bent
silent and without defence before the sternest and
most unsparing cruelty of words which rebuked him
with his sin.
" Have pity I for her sake ! "
His voice trembled in its humbled prayer ; and his
mother's heart smote her for the stripes with which
she had struck him where he was defenceless. She
laid her hand softly on his shoulder, her face no
longer stern, but blanched with a great horror.
"Forgive me, forgive me! But, oh, my son, it
cannot be, it must not be "
" It sJiall be."
She Imew the tone of old ; the inflexible will of the
Strathmores of White Ladies, than which iron were
easier to bend, fire were easier to cross; and she
was silent. This marriage ! She shuddered from it
as from some great sin, from some inevitable evil;
"yet she had no power to avert it, no power to
arrest it ; she could not turn traitress to her son, she
could not unfold to the life which was centred in his,
the history which would be its surest death-blow ?
" It shall be who shall prevent it ? " said Strath-
more, and his voice rose slightly louder. " My own
L 2
148 STRATHMOKE.
peace I would sacrifice, my own life I would give up
what I liad suffered would have mattered nothing
but hers I will never surrender. That course is right
which most shields her. I swore to keep her years
from every grief ; I will redeem my oath. Shall
/ strike her ? shall I curse her ? Where would be
the atonement I vowed to her father ? Would he bid
me destroy her young life ? Would he see expiation
to himself in her misery through the very love which
he bade me foster? To whom, had he now been
living, would he have given her so gladly as to
me? "
The swift, imperious, resolved passion in his voice
ceased suddenly, his lips quivered again ; he thought
with what gladness and what faith Lucille, drawing
closer the bond of their brotherhood, would have
been trusted to his keeping as to the friend best
Imown and best beloved, by the man whom he had
slain, had he been living now !
His mother looked at him ; and her courage failed
her to pierce by one added sting the wound laid open
so deeply and bared without defence. She knew
that his decision, once declared, was unalterable ;
she could not dispute it, or persuade it, and there
was truth in what he said, that to consign to bit-
terness the young and joyous years of Lucille, were
to cancel all that had been done as obedience to the
dead, and leave worse than unfulfilled the office be-
queathed him. Yet he her husband he !
" 1ST AUCir DIESS EIN lEKTHUM," ETC. 149
She shuddered, and her hands locked close upon
his arm.
" Strathmore ! Strathmore ! wait. If she should
ever Iviiow "
His face grew whiter for the moment ; the thought
froze his very heart.
" Know ! She cannot. No living soul could find
a trace of her birth."
Her hand leant heavier on his arm, and her voice
was sunk to a tremulous whisper :
" But is crime ever buried ? It sleeps, but it is
never dead ; and oh, my son, my son ! its prey is so
often the innocent ! "
He laughed a hopeless laugh, bitterly, bitterly
sad.
" What ! even youj my mother ! deny that my
guilt can reach atonement ! Then remorse is a fool's
travail, and the sinner must live for ever in the hell
he has made to himself ! It is a harsh law still
not harsher than / merit."
The despair in his voice recoiled back on her own
heart, and her eyes filled with tears, the slow, salt
tears of age.
" Cecil, my son, my son ! would / condemn you ?
Remorse is holy to God, sacred in man. The prayer
of my life is that yours may be blessed. But but
I confess it, for you to wed her "
" Peace ! " broke in Strathmore, with passionate
force. " We have said enough. My resolve is taken ;
150 STEATIIMOEE.
my hand is pledged ; Lucille will be mine. Let us
never speak again of what we have spoken to-night.
Seek her, the innocent child ! rejoice with her, give
her tenderness, give her love. Henceforth you must
show her that she is more to you than she has ever
been."
With these brief words of command, rather than
of entreaty, he bowed low with his distant and punc-
tilious courtesy, and left her presence; his mother
knew that what he had chosen was irrevocable.
" You love him so well, my darling?" she said,
softly, that night; and as Lucille's head was raised
for one swift moment, and her face uplifted in its shy
joy, the aged and world- worn v/oman who looked on
her ceased to wonder that he bade the dead past lie
sealed within its grave, and sought to shield for ever
in his own bosom the dawning life which had known
but the cloudless sunlisiht of childhood till it awakened
to the richer, deejDer lustre of its future.
Yet the shadow of the past was on her ; and she
dreaded it.
On the morrow he left for Paris, and Lucille, with
his mother, quitted White Ladies.
He could not wait there, could not have her stay
there, while in that cabin on the shore Marion Vava-
sour lay, tendered by beggars' charity !
151
CHAPTER IX.
"and UNFOPtGIVING, UNFORGIVEN.
It was twilight as Stratlmiore paced slowly up and
down one of the deserted allees of the Bois de Bou-
logne, while the fallen leaves were strewn beneath his
feet, and the shades of the night drew on : he waited
for Valdor.
The fiery Henri Cinquiste, rarely given to prudence,
had now^ a value and sweetness in his life too great to
let him risk it rashly ; and he was proscribed in Paris,
and could only venture oiTt when evening fell. Strath-
more waited for him, pacing the long aisle under the
red-brown boughs, hanging stirless in heavy air;
the same allee where, in the years that were gone,
in the amber sunlight he had watched the speeding of
his vengeance as the Discrowned had passed through
her long pilgrimage of insult and of outrage.
In the twilight a man's form came swiftly towards
him, and he saw in the rapidity of the step, and the
152 STEATHMOEE.
look, wliicli by the still lingering light he could read
upon his face, with what joyous and fearless hope Val-
dor came to the meeting. For him he felt the deepest
pity he had ever known ; Strathmore now grieved
sincerely and unselfishly for the grief of another.
The tenderness of his own love for Lucille had soft-
ened the coldness of his heart ; it had made him
humane it had made him compassionate. He was
in no wise blamable towards Yaldor ; on the contrary,
he had fulfilled his word, and acted with the strictest
justice and generosity in his dealing with the cause
of his absent rival ; and yet he felt something of self-
reproach for the hope which, in honourable though
erroneous belief, he had been the one to confirm, and
which he must now be also the one to destroy.
With glad eagerness Yaldor came up to him, and
Strathmore held out his hand with the generous cor-
diality of his earlier years ; but, as he met his eyes,
the coldness of a sudden and unlooked-for dread came
over the French Noble : he saw in them a look wholly
new there the look of pity.
" Tell me the worst at once, Strathmore," he said,
quickly. " I cannot bear suspense. Is it "
Strathmore, in the simple impulse of a genuine
sympathy, turned from him as he answered, and his
voice was gentle and mellow :
" It is I who am to blame, though, God knows, I
believed honestly what I told you. Forgive me ; I
misled you, you misled yourself, Yaldor."
He did not look upon the face of the man to whom
" AND UNFORGIVING, UNFOEGIVEN." 153
he was compelled to deal so deadly a wound, but he
heard the quick, sharp catch of his breath.
" Is there no hope ? "
His voice was husky and inarticulate ; that which
answered him was tender and compassionate.
" None. I grieve that I ever deceived you."
They stood together under the yellow autumn trees,
and, looking on him now, Strathmore saw how keen
and mortal was his pain. Yaldor had forgotten all in
that moment, save the bitter, sudden desolation which
struck down all the tender and Vivid hope that he
had cherished, until it had become well-nigh as sweet
to him and as sure as certainty.
He turned, and walked swiftly up and down the
allee with his head bent for some seconds ; he could
not bear that another man should look on what he
felt. His belief had been so strong that his love was
returned ! and the hot ardour of a Southern's passion
was blended with the chivalrous tenderness in which
he held her, till the thought of Lucille had become
the core and the soul of his life.
He paused suddenly before Strathmore, and in the
gloom his cheek was pale, and his lips worked pain-
fully, while in his eyes and his air there was a hot
and haughty defiance.
" She loves another ? "
Strathmore looked steadily at him, and in his gaze
there was a deep compassion still ; he grieved honestly
and generously for the pain before him.
" She does."
154 STEATHMOEE.
"Who is he?"
There was menace in Yaldor's answeiing ghince :
his own sudden sharpness of anguish made him un-
just, and his fiery anger rose in revolt against his
unknown rival.
Strathmore looked at him, and spoke with a rare and
singular sympathy in the gentleness of his voice ; the
young love of Lucille lay warm in his heart, and
made him more merciful to all men, specially so to
those who had sought her in vain.
"Yaldor, hear me first. What I said to you I
honestly believed, or I had never spoken it. I thought
that Lucille loved you. I told her word for word
what you desired me. I did your cause every justice
you know me, and you know that I should do so.
I give }'ou my word of honour, that I dreamt as little
as yourself that I should have now to tell you
what ''
"TFAo is loved by her?"
The question broke fiercely and swiftly in upon his
words ; suspicion flashed on him, for the glance of
her rejected lover saw the altered look which had
come upon Strathmore's face since the night when
they had parted beneath the palms, a look of light, of
rest, of relief, of something that was almost happiness.
"lam."
" You!''
They faced each other in the twilight, and their
eyes met. Strathmore's face was calm, filled still with
much of compassion, and free to all scrutiny, for to
155
Valdor's cause he had done his duty honourably and
fully, and he desei'ved no reproach at his hands.
Valdor's was deeply flushed ; there was danger in it,
and the tumult of a jealous passion.
" You ! God in heaven, then you lied to me !"
Strathmore's face grew dark ; the lightning leapt
to his eyes for a second only for that, -he could
make extenuation and have patience here, and there
was nothing harsher than a proud and just dignity in
his look and in his words :
"In a calmer moment you will see you do me
injustice. It would not be possible for any man who
knows my name to accuse me of cowardice or dis-
honour. I kept my word to you strictly ; it was an
after hazard which revealed to me what when we
parted I dreamt as little as you."
" She loves you I you /"
There was something almost of terror and in-
credulity, mingled with the jealousy, Avith which
he stood before Strathmore in the glooni of the
early night. Strathmore bent his head ; some
passion was rising in him, and he would not allow
it rein ; Avith the soft touch of Lucille' s lips in their
first kiss, gentleness had stolen into his heart, and
wakened compassion in him towards those who suf-
fered.
" And you ^you return it ? you allow it ? you will
wed her ? "
A haughty anger passed over Strathmore's face :
" Assuredly. I shall become her husband."
156 STRATHMOEE.
As lie spoke the words, the winds, slowly rising,
swept up with a hollow and melancholy moan through
the dying leaves of the autumn trees.
Valdor looked at him, the blood staining his face,
his breath thick and laboured, his words stifled in his
throat :
" Her husband ! Never, if I live ! You have be-
trayed me, and you shall renounce all thought of
her ! "
Strathmore's teeth clenched, but he strove to hold
down his wrath, and he succeeded; it was with a
melancholy and proud forbearance, the more worthy
that it was so alien to his nature, that he answered
now :
" Those are strange words, but you have a right to
feel bitterly, and I must wait till with reflection and
time you do me more justice. I can but give you
my word that I acted in honour and honesty to you,
while I had no thought that her love ^"
" Her Jove, hers I I swear to Heaven you shall
renounce such an unhallowed, unnatural, forbidden
union," cried Valdor, wildly and blindly, with im-
perious command. " Strathmore ! listen to me. I
may never wed her, but neither shall you. I forbid
sach a marriage, I arrest it ; you shall renounce it
to-niffht and for ever ! "
" You ? Are you a madman ? "
He spoke calmly yet, but the forbearance was pass-
ing from his soul and the pitying tranquillity from his
face, though the meaning of the words he heard did
" AND UNFOEGIVING, UNFOEGIVEN." 157
not as jet dawn on liim, for he deemed the secret
too safely buried to be ever brought to Hght; no
living being knew Lucille as Erroli's child.
Valdor drew nearer still to him, his hot blood
up, his eyes lit with dangerous menace, his pain
blinding him to all memory, save that the man before
him was his rival, who had robbed him of what he
loved.
" / arrest it, / forbid it ! By the God above us
you shall never be the husband of Lucille."
Strathmore's arms were folded with his habitual
attitude across his chest, and his eyes looked steadily
into the face of Valdor, in the deepening of the
night.
" You forbid it? and how?
" I shall tell her that you were the murderer of her
father."
The words broke, abrupt and hideous, on the
silence, Strathmore started, his face grew white in
the grey gloom, and into his eyes came a terrible
hunted agony ; was he ever to strive towards peace,
and ever to have it shattered from his grasp ? He
lost the strength, the memory, the calm which might
still, at cost of truth, have baffled his accuser ; any
who had looked on him then would have pitied to
their heart's core the man whose haughtiest pride,
whose humblest remorse, were alike powerless to wash
out and to atone for a repented past : any, save one
who loved where he loved !
" You ^you " he gasped ; then his voice died.
158 STRATHMOEE.
liis dread, his anguish were less for himself than they
were for her whose death-blow would be the know-
led o-e of his crime.
Valdor looked on him without pity, for the evil
spirit of a jealous passion possessed him, and while it
reigned darkened his heart, and drove thence all
compassion, all mercy, all generous chivalry to his
rival.
" Ay ! Here, where you slew him, I swear she
shall know that the hand which she would caress as
her husband's, took the life which gave her own. Will
she wed you then f Ask yourself ! "
"Wed me you would be her death !"
His voice was filled with a fearful misery, for it
was her life which hung in the balance and not his
alone. He had no thought to mislead the man who
thus accused him ; for his strength had broken down
before the sudden danger, and the nature of Strath-
more, when the world had not warped it, was m-
stinctively truth ; truth, be temptation, or cost what
they might.
" Her death ! Better that than marriage with her
father's assassin!" broke in Yaldor, bitterly, in his
despair he grew cruel and reckless. " If you would
spare her, renounce that; swear to me that never,
whether I live or die, shall Lucille be youi* wife, or I
arrest your union at any cost, by letting her know you
as you are. She is the daughter of Erroll ; she shall
hear how he fell by the hand of the friend he trusted
more than a brother !"
"and UNFOECtIVING, unfoegiven." 159
Stratlimore quivered like a woman who is dealt a
brutal blow ; he was struck where his strength was
paralysed, he was wounded where he had no shield.
In the reality of his remorse, he held the vilest
words which could scouroje his sin but his due chas-
tisement, to be taken in silence and submission ; and
here he had no force, no defiance, no power, for she
was menaced ! And for her he stooped as for him-
self he would have never done.
He stood before Valdor, his head drooped, his face
livid, his hands outstretched in the first prayer of
supplication to which he had ever bent to any living
man.
" Your words are bitter, but / merit them ; were
they a thousandfold harder I should have no title to
resent them. I, ' a mui'derer ! ' I am at your mercy,
so is she ; I would not ask it for myself, but for her
for her."
His voice dropped inarticulate, with strong effort
he commanded it, and spoke again, lifting his head
with the dignity natural to him, touchingly mingled
with the self-humiliation so alien to his nature.
" You have my secret ; measure my thirst for
expiation by the vileness of my crime it is as great,
greater it could not be ! She was his trust to me ; in
her peace, her life, lies my sole power of atonement to
him. For the love of God, spare me that ! By your
power, be generous ! By your tenderness to her, do
not deal her her death-blow ! She is innocent, would
you strike her ? destroy her ? curse her soul with
IGO STEATHMOKE.
that deadly tale of vilest guilt ? Not as rival to rival,
but as man to man I implore you. Have mercy not
to me, not to me ^but to her ! "
Not in the most victorious hours of his powerful
oratory had his eloquence been so true as now, when
it lay but in the broken, hollow words of a great
agony his haughty nature bent and stricken, his
guilt confessed, his soul laid bare.
Alas ! he who else had been swiftest to be touched
and won by the prayer of a proud life laid subject,
here was blind, and steeled, and without pity in that
hour, for he loved.
" Eenounce your marriage, and she shall not know
her father's blood is on your hands."
In the gloom of the night the words fell from the
lips of the man who had his secret ; and Strathmore
learned the bitterness that lies in mercy denied to
extremity.
" Renounce ? I cannot ! My peace I would surren-
der, my life you should have to torture as you would, I
have no claim to pity, no right to joy ! ^but I cannot
give up hers, I cannot leave her forsaken, insulted,
her youth embittered, her life more than widowed ?
My God ! it is lier happiness that is my solitary atone-
ment to her father. Wreck that ! by my own hand,
my own consent ! Are you brute or man that you
ask it ? Would you be nearer her love because she
were divorced by me ? "
The blood stained Val dor's face, and on it came no
pity.
"and UNFOKGIVINCt, unfoegiven." 161
" Renounce her ! " he said, fiercely, " or she shall
know you as you are ! "
" You are resolved ? "
" Yes, by the God above us ! "
" So be it do your worst !"
Then Strathmore lifted his head and stood erect ;
he pleaded no more, and on his face, calm now, the
look of iron pride, of chill tranquillity the look which
was evil had returned. It was his special and un-
happy fate that whenever he strove strove earnestly
tow^ards better things and gentler thoughts, there
circumstance arose and turned him backward into
darkness, and denied him to rise into the purer light.
In the night which had now only descended they
fronted one another, the fiery menace of his foe met
by a cold and fathomless defiance ; and in Strathmore's
eyes, although the memory of him whom he had slain
yonder in the poisonous gloom beside the old deer-
water, still lay like a sacred chain binding down his
passions, there was a glance dangerous to the man
who had driven him to extremity. Then, without
word or sign, he turned away from him and went
slowly through the avenue, with his arms folded on his
breast, while Yaldor, with swift, uneven steps, swept
onward, whither he cared not and knew not, into the
dark sear woodland of the deserted place.
Fear need have followed him close as his shadow ;
lie had wronged, and denied, and stung to extremity,
when it was abased, and unveiled, and suppliant, a
nature which never forgave.
VOL. III. M
162
CHAPTER X.
EVIL DONE THAT GOOD MAY COME.
The knowledge that Valdor held the secret which,
once told, must part for ever Lucille's life from his,
left Strathmore stunned like a man felled by an un-
seen blow on the brain. He had believed that no
living soul could find trace of her birth, and the
stroke fell suddenly and without warning, paralysing
the hand wiiich had deemed its strength strong to all
control of circumstance. He was wound beyond
escape in the folds of fate, as the Laocoon in the
serpent coils. And the sickening sense of poive7''less-
ness the most terrible torture, I think, which this
world holds, certainly the most terrible to one whose
will is forcible, and whose habit is to rule tightened
about him, and stifled his very life.
He lost all sense, save that of an impotent despair,
in which he tore at his bonds and ^vrithed beneath
the retribution of his past; a maddened, feverish
EVIL DONE THAT GOOD MAY COME. 163
agony, under ^vliose goad all the evil of his nature
rose, a giant in its desperation. His own life he
would have flung down a prey to any fate that could
liave seized it ; but hers ! there was no sin that
Strathmore would have shrunk from to warcl off from
her fair and sacred innocence the dark curse of his
buried crime.
It left him no more than the sheer wild instinct of
self-preservation, such as that on which men and
brutes act in a moment of supreme and hideous peril.
His calm had been shattered, he had lost that keen
acumen Avhich in statecraft placed him beyond rival
^that cool, clear wisdom which led him, unerring, to
men's every weakness and every impulse. Else, had
he judged more truly of his foe ; else, had he known
that his swift Southern passion once bated justice
and mercy would have revived in Valdor, and his
hand would have withheld the blow which could not
have avenged him, save by striking at the one whom
he loved most gently and most chivalrously. It w^as
not in the nature of the French Noble to be merciless
or cruel ; a generous repentance followed swiftly on
every thought or act of passion it did so now.
The jealousy of a love which, at the very moment
of its sweetest hope, had been denied and dashed to
earth, had goaded him for the hour into hatred and
resolution inexorable as those of the man they me-
naced. He saw in Strathmore but the rival who had
robbed him ; he wronged him, in the hot haste of a
bitter disappomtment, by the belief that he had be-
m2
164 STEATHMOEE.
trayed the embassy entrusted to him ; he grasped, in
the desperation of his love, at the revenge which
woukl sunder her for ever from the lover who stood
before him. And for the hour Yaldor was blind with
that passion which makes men devils ; and was with-
out pity for him who had been pitiless.
But, as the grey morning dawned, and the day
rolled on, through whose dreary length he was chained
to his chamber for the sake of the cause which he
served, lest his presence should be known in Paris,
the selfish spirit left him, and the nobler regained its
hold. The bitterness relaxed, with which he had
been drunk as with raki, till humanity was deadened
by it, and no thought was left him but revenge ;
justice came back to him, and all the softer thoughts
of a love which was essentially pure and true arose,
and made him shrink from a vengeance which must
strike at her. His heart smote him for the merciless-
ness with which he had been steeled to the prayer of
the proud nature which had stooped to plead, and to
the remorse which had been laid bare before him in
its anguish for expiation. He saw that, as great as
had been the crime of this man, so was his repent-
ance sacred ; his conscience recoiled from undoing
the labour of such repentance, from destroying the
innocent Avith the sin of the guilty, from smiting him
who strove towards a just atonement with the deeds
of his own past.
He knew how Lucille loved Strathmore, for he had
studied that love, and feared it, till a false hope had
EVIL DONE THAT GOOD MAY COME. 165
blinded him with its traitor-sweetness. He knew
now how the man whom the world called heart-
less and conscienceless, had been scourged by the
flail of remorse, and had centred his sole power of
restitution in one young frail life. And the nobler
nature wrestled in him with that which was more
evil, and overthrew the baser. " His remorse is
holy it is not for me to touch it. Had she loved me
I should have reverenced his secret ; because her love
is his, shall I turn traitor ? " This was the true
instinct of a gallant heart ; and as the long brown
autumn day ended and night stole near, he rose
armed with such strength as men may best bring to
meet the bitterness of cheated hope and joy dashed
down for ever, and went out into the falling twilight
to say this, and this only, to him whom Lucille
loved.
And as he felt the first cool rush of the evening
wind, and left the solitude of his chamber for the
chilly yellow night, a shadow stole towards him, and
he was arrested a State Prisoner.
In the stillness of that midnight Strathmore stood
beside the tomb where deep in the stainless marble
was carved the record of his crime. The white
autumn mists were heavy on the air, the winds sighed
among the long grass that blew above Erroll's grave,
and the gold-leaved boughs of the dying trees swayed
over the stone where he was lain in the dark dank
earth forgot by all save one.
166 STKATHMOKE.
Strathmore stood there beside the resting-place of
the man whom he had slain in all the noon and glory
of his manhood; and his heart was sick with the
deadly pain of the past, and with the burden of the
futm^e. For evil had seized both. And the sin-taint
from that which was gone, breathed over, and reached,
and poisoned the fair years migrasped.
He knew that the past, once told, would be as
surely death to her as the touch of poison or the
breath of pestilence ; he knew that Lucille, living
but in his love, would be smitten more gently by the
f ellest disease that ever seized the loveliness of youth,
than by the words which should bid her see in him
who sought her with a husband's tenderness the
destroyer of those who gave her birth. It was not
his own passion, his own peace, his ow^n joy ; not the
shelter of his crime, or the years of his future, or the
desire of his soul which was at the stake and in the
balance these he would have given uj) a prey to any
fate, a meet sacrifice to any vengeance that befel
him ; what were in jeopardy were hers his trust from
the man whom he had loved as David loved the son
of Saul, whom he had slain as Cain slew the son of
Eve.
She must be spared.
This was the sole thought, the sole sense that was
left him. He had been denied mercy. And, swift
as naphtha to flame, under the torture, all the worst
in him leapt to life. With that denial his resolve was
taken, blind, and knowing neither how iior when its
EVIL DONE THAT GOOD MAY COME. 167
way would be pioneered, but fixed and inflexible
the resolve to silence at any cost^ at any peril, tlie
rival whose knowledge of his secret menaced Lucille.
Alas for him ! Strathmoi-e had not yet learned that it
is not given to man to mould the shape and way of
fate at will, and that to do evil that good may come^
is but to add sin to sin, sepulchre to sepulchre.
When he left his foe hi the still autumn night his
will was set, forged to iron in the fires of an agonised
and imminent terror. Crime itself looked holy in
his sight if for her, and all that could save Iter was
justified to him. And he had ever in him too much
of the passionate imperious Cassarian choice : " Let
him mm^ler, but let him reign ! "
Yet, it had been truly said of him, " A bad man
sometimes, a dangerous man always, but a false man
never." He recoiled from the sole means of pre-
servation which rose within his grasp as he would
from some dastard poison with which he had been
tempted to still the foe who held his secret. Strath-
more, guilty m much, and cruel where his will was
crossed, had no taint of the traitor in him. Great
crimes might stain him, but baseness or perfidy had
no lodging in his natm^e. His creed of honour was
lofty, knightly, unsullied the creed of the stately
nobles whose blood was in his veins and an act that
even drew nigh the vileness of betrayal was loath-
some, and had ever been impossible to him.
Yet here, in the blindness of dread, in the sudden-
ness with which he saw Lucille threatened, and knew
168 STEATHMOEE.
that he must either silence the lips which could breathe
his secret, or see her life destroyed here, there rose
but one means of salvation for her, and to shield her
he grasped it. Anything, I have said, looked just to
him which should be done to save the innocent from
the burden of his guilt ; all, that for himself he would
have withstood, grew to him a resistless tempting, a
sin righteous and imperative, when it stood out be-
fore him as the sole force by which he could rescue
her from destruction by his own hand the hand
pledged to her as her husband's.
The ordeal was fearful to him. His soul recoiled
from evil, and, " as the hart panteth for the water- '
springs," thirsted for peace peace of heart, peace of \
conscience. And it escaped him ever, ever. He ;
was driven on and on unceasing forced to sin that
the innocent might be saved, forced to do evil that
good might come. !
His influence was not seen in his work; none ;
knew that his mind had conceived it ; silently, wisely,
with a master's finesse, with an unerring skill the |
web was woven, the mine was sprung, by means the j
subtlest yet simplest ; a word, a hint nay ! scarce so
much and the State hounds were set on the slot of ;
Henri Cinq's Royals. Strathmore had known the j
projects of that too frank and too chivalrous party ; a j
thread dropped which could not be traced to him, a |
suggestion lent which could not involve its speaker, i
a counsel given which was but the well-advised warn- "j
ing of a foreign minister to a friendly court ; and he i
EVIL DONE THAT GOOD MAY COME. 169
who had been so rash in the bitterness of cheated
love as to menace one who never spared friend in
his path, and never aimed save to strike home, was
flung into a State prison, where the loyal heart would
consume in silence, and the knightly spirit would
break in solitude, till the cell should be changed for
the galley bench of the Bagne or the malarious swamp
of Cayenne.
Strathmore had wrought the ruin of the man who
had braved him wrought it with the subtle, yet pas-
sionate and unfaltering will with which his race de-
stroyed whatever was bold enough, and mad enough, to
cross their road, and oppose their power. But his soul
had revolted from it, and in it he had endured for Lu-
cille what for no other stake he would have suffered.
He would have refused to save himself by such a cost ;
he paid it to save her. He, whose honour his foulest
enemies could not impeach, knew himself false to the
man who had placed faith in him ; the cowardice of
betrayal tainted, in his own sight and his own know-
ledge, the act by which his rival and his foe had been
given up to a doom not less inexorable, scarce less
cruel, than the grave ; for the single time in a long
life, which, unscrupulous, pitiless, and darkly stained,
had yet never been soiled with one unknightly taint,
he knew himself a traitor to his trust, a traitor to his
creed.
And he stood there beside the tomb of the dead
man for whose sake he had done this thing.
" Traitor ! traitor !" said Strathmore, in his teeth,
170 STEATHMOEE.
and in liis eyes was a terrible wistful misery as tliey
gazed down on tlie black grass that grew thick above
Erroll's gi-ave. " I only needed to be that ! Heaven
help me ! I said her life should be before my own.
So it has been, so it shall be. It is done for your
sake, in yow trust. Oh, God ! sm-ely for you, though
ftot for me ^"
Not for himself never for himself but for the
dead whom he loved, and the hallowed life that he
guarded, surely, he thought, the work of his expiation
would not fail at the last ?
Following the consequence that links one sin on to
another, he had plunged headlong down into addi-
tional crime ; as a man, having once set his foot into
the loose quicksands, is drawn step by step, lower
and lower, powerless to wrench himself free from the
devouring mass, sinking farther and farther, locked
in and sucked downward till he is lost for ever, while
the sun is bright above head, and the horrors of the
grave yawn for him alone for him by whom one
false step first was made.
In the very hour when all his heart ached with its
yearning for a purer life ; in the very moment when
he had taken to himself the treasure and the trust of
another existence to be bound in his own, in the very-
instant when all that was vile in him seemed to have
fallen away, and he had sworn to consecrate such
years as might remain to him, to unremitting ejffort
to assoil his life, and give it such worthiness as he
EVIL DONE THAT GOOD MAY COME. 171
could still reachj to be in union with Lucille' s
in that very instant temptation had again assailed
him, and he had fallen beneath it ; crime had again
come ready to his hand, and he had stretched out his
hand and taken its iniquitous aid, its shameful succour.
Were the idle myths of superstition true, were the
fables of benighted priests real, he asked himself, with
cruel self-mockery and self-reviling; and had he
sold his sold to some fiend of darkness that he could
never make his escape from sin, but always seized it
and became one with it like this? Was he devil-
possessed that he could never resist the guilt he
loathed, but was forced down into it, and dwelt, as
though he loved it, always in some deeper depth of
its pollution, some closer bond of its fellowship and
communion ?
No man living on earth could have hated him, as
he liated himself. No man have thought his infamy
so deeply damned, as he himself knew it to be. The
act that had made him a murderer, was scarce so
vile in Strathmore's sight, as the act that made him
a traitor !
He had saved her but at what a cost ! For her he
would have given his life at any hour; but he had
given far more now. His oath had been to sacrifice
all things past, and present, and future, to the keep-
ing of her father's trust ; and the fulfilment of his
oath had become more than the sacrifice of mere
existence : it was the acceptance of a long and hving
martyrdom the martyrdom, not of renunciation,
172 STRATHMOEE.
whicli guiltless may bring strength to its own tor-
ture, but one that could have no such solace the
martyrdom of shame ! Shame ! none the less, but
the more, because like his doom, it was unknown and
un chastised by man.
Traitor !
The word sounded in his ear night and day ; it lay
like a curse upon his name; it mocked him in his
memory with every honourable phrase that others
uttered to or wrote of him ; when he went among his
peers he knew himself not fit to have place near
them ; when their unstained hands ipet his, or their
frank words applauded him, he knew that if they
could tell the infamy that was upon him, they would
leave his presence as they would leave any black-
guard's who had robbed their treasuries ^he had been
false to all the dignity of his order, to all the honour
of his manhood. He knew it ; the open scorn of
Europe could not have made him know it more ter-
ribly. Strathmore in all his guilt a man who held,
with all the loyalty of a proud nature, and the in-
grained instinct of a patrician creed, to the most
stringent laws of honour ; a man who, in all his worst
errors would never by nature have become false, but
who would have cut off his right hand rather than
have sullied his lips with a lie, or betrayed the meanest
thing that crawled if it had once trusted him suf-
fered in the consciousness of disgrace, in the enforced
shame of this sin so alien to his every instinct and his
EVIL DONE THAT GOOD MAY COME. 173
every act, a torture whicli beggared all that life had
ever brought him.
It might have been less terrible if he could have
suffered openly for it ; for with every time that he
took the world's homage, every time that he moved
amongst his own order, he felt himself afresh a traitor
against it and them letting them honour what he
knew dishonoured. His nature, moreover, w^as one to
give itself up without appeal to all the chastisement
that was his due ; and here no hand chastised, no
voice upbraided, and no judges stoned him ; what he
had done was unknown, unseen, and he w^as compelled
to go to what was joy, even all darkened and tainted
as it was ; joy that he w^as conscious by every justice
should never have been his. He had to go to the
sweetness of Lucille's tender words, to the caress of
her young lips, to the beauty of her reverent and
happy love ; he had to go to all these things that
make earth while they last an Eden, with the know-
ledge in his heart that turned them into bitterness. It
was this loveliness waiting for him as reward for the
treachery he had wrought, this happiness given to
him as recompense for his sin, that made him seem
to himself a thousand times more loathsome. If he
had done this thing to save her, while giving her to
another's arms in his own sacrifice, he might have
forgiven it to himself in some faint measure ; but
now although no thought, no memory of self had
prompted him to it, although it had been done simply
174 STEATIIMOEE.
and solely /or her, the joy that came to him through
it made it beyond all pardon in his sight. And
it had a tenfold anguish, striking him back into
the darkness of accumulated guilt at the moment
when some beam of light, some ray of peace had
strayed in on him ; when with the love of Lucille he
had yainly dreamt of regained tranquillity, of joy
that would come to him out of her joy, of a purer
happiness that might still be his, of a better life in
which his later years might take their fairer hue from
hers, and be spent with her in the effort towards
nobler things. This hope, this dream, had come to
him with the treasure of her innocent affection ; it was
gone for ever now. He almost dreaded the gaze of
her eyes ; he almost shuddered from the touch of her
lips.
For the sin that he had sinned for her was hea\y
on him ; and he had gained her by the crime of an
Iscariot.
There is no guilt so terrible to him by whom it is
done as the guilt that is abhorrent to the nature
which yet stoops to it.
Late in the fall of an autumn evening he reached
Silver-rest to meet her for the first time since he had '
done this last thing for her sake ; in so utter yet so
erring a sacrifice. The twilight was darkening over
,sea and land, though here in the sheltered south,
flowers still blossomed and woods were still in full
leaf. A little while, and when he had parted from
her, in the sweetness of her love he had thought that
EVIL DONE THAT GOOD MAY COME. 175
there might still be in some sort peace for him, and
pardon for his past ; he had thought that the future
might still bring him some blessing, through her, and
through the trust so loyally, so passionately obeyed.
Noic he shrank from her presence ; he had not
right or title to one shadow of the tenderness she gave
him ; he felt that what he had done for her must?
soon or late, bring its own punishment, that in his
embrace even her own angel-like beauty must be
tainted, her ow^n fair God-given life be doomed and
destroyed with his !
All the wild untamable nature in him suffered
now ; suffered, flinging down like film the phi-
losophy of his creeds, the languor of his world, the
egotism of his habits ; suffered with the dumb agony
of an animal, the blind pain of an untutored barbarian.
Nature w^as stronger even now than all the force of
intellect, custom, sophism, and reason.
He believed at last in his own utter weakness ; he
believed at last that he could not command oblivion.
He paused now, as he went to where they told him
that she was, in the stillness of the twihght, on the
wooded shores of Silver-rest. He longed for her with
unutterable longing, yet he dreaded to see her as he
had never dreaded any thing on earth ; a chill tremor
passed over him, and he stopped to still the beating
of his heart. He would have gone to the scaffold
like Montrose or Derwentwater with unmoved se-
renity, without his pulse quickening its throb one
instant ; now going to one who revered him almost
176 STKATHMORE.
as a deity, and for whose sake he had wrought the
iniquity he loathed, he shook like a woman in every
limb, and paused, as in the days of Hellas, the guilt-
stricken paused before the threshold of the sacred
temple they dared not enter.
Yet; he must smile on her as though no chasm
lay between them ; he must look down into her trust-
ful eyes ; he must take her life into his own ; he
must become her husband. Was it not for this, this
only that he had sinned ?
In that moment he recoiled from his offered joy as
he would never have recoiled from death. In that
moment once again to lose her, or to wed her,
seemed alike an anguish passing his strength. The
brown still depths of leaves enclosed him, there was
no light about his steps, the lull of silence was
oppressive, the chiar'oscuro of the falling evening was
only broken by the deeper blackness of some tower-
ing rock that lowered through the gloom ; he paused
there, hearing only the beating of his own heart ; the
darkness was like the darkness on his years, that had
no place beside the bright spotlessness of hers. Then,
with a sudden gesture, almost of despair, he dashed
back the boughs, that parted them with that black
barrier, as his own acts parted them in his own sight.
He saw her there; in a flood of warmth from the
setting sun that found its way about her, and bathed
her in its halo, as, in the Old Masters, the Children of
God are bathed in light; the crimson shafts of the
red rocks slanting upward till they were lost in hang-
EVIL DONE THAT GOOD MAY COME. 177
ing \^Teaths of mist; the scarlet and golden foliage
encircling her ; at her feet the violet waves of the calm
waters ; and full on her face the lustre of the dying
sun's rays as they poured down from the west.
Coming from the shadow of the gloomy woods, he
saw her in that glory of radiance, pure as her life,
radiant as her smile, divine as her innocence. What
place had he beside her ? With a great unconscious
cry, that in that moment forgot all that must be
sealed and silent for her sake, he threw himself
before her ere she knew that he was near ; there, at
her feet, in that sunlit luminance that never now
could touch his own dishonoured life, emblem of the
peace and beauty he had for ever flung away; his
arms about her, his head sunk in a suppliant's entreaty,
his burning lips upon the hands he clasped.
" Oh ! my child ! my treasure ! my darling ! I
have come back to you, but my life has no fitness for
yours. And yet oh, God ! I have given you more
than my life ; I have suffered for you more than a
hundred deaths ; I have denied you nothing ; I have
lost for you all I had left on earth. Love me, for
the pity of Heaven ! love me, come what will ! It
is for you that I have sinned, for you only that I
live "
The wild words died almost in their utterance,
stifled in his throat, as he knelt before her, his head
bowed, his arms thrown round her in the passion, less
of an embrace than of an agonised prayer and suppli-
cation. The last, only, reached her ear; the last
VOL. III. N
178 STKATHMOEE.
wliicli told her it was for lier alone he lived, and
which implored her tenderness. Vaguely, with a
great terror, mingling with the dizzy sweetness of his
sudden presence, she felt that he suffered, she saw
that his life had a misery in it untold, unconfessed ;
and the love, greater still than all fear in her, and far
deeper than her young years, gave her its truest in-
stinct ; she had no thought of herself ; she only felt
that he suffered. Her soft lips, with a tremulous
hesitance, met his in their first self-offered kiss, her
eyes with a dark dreamy lustre gazed into his own
through tears that rose but did not fall; her voice
was broken with a deeper music than it had ever
known :
" Ah, my lord ! my love ! have you yet to learn
that my life is yours, and that youi' death will be
mine?"
The words were few, and very low ; but there was
an accent in tliem that told that this, and nothing
less than this, "was the love she bore him ; in the
golden light and scarlet foliage that circled her, the
radiance from the western skies shone in her eyes and
bathed her still in its bright aureole, as though loth
to leave a thing so fair to the cold shadows of the
night. Looking upward he saw her thus in the warm
glory from the evening rays; sin should not have
been her saviour ! He knew it now.
He had sacrificed to her all he valued upon earth ;
he had beggared himself more utterly than poverty
could have beggared him when, for her sake, he had
EVIL DONE THAT GOOD MAY COME. 179
lost Honour ; at the last, would even this be done in
vain ?
" Evil done that good may come." Kash and mi-
hallowed work which tampers with the Unseen, and
sows the poison-seeds that the golden fruit may
bloom; at the core of the fruit will not the poison
ever be found ?
Yet if the cause of any earthly life could have
justified that touching of unfolded destiny, hers
would have been that one ; hers which he deemed he
had done justly to spare at any cost, as he looked on
her in her loveliness, and met the sweet, shy, half-
veiled joy of her fair eyes.
His approaching marriage was made public, and
the world saw nothing save that which was most
natural in it. There was, true, some wide disparity
of years between them ; but then he had altered so
little in person from what he had been at thirty, and
had an eminence of so brilliant a fame, that the
world felt no wonder that in his maturity of prime
and of power he should have fascinated, and been
fascinated by, the beautiful youth of his ward.
Once pledged to it, on the impulse of a moment that
had been stronger than himself, he hastened his
marriage with the least delay that was possible
hastened it with a restless, fevered impatience that
shared far more in the disquiet of dread than in the
softer anxiety of passion. The knowledge that one
lived who knew his secret filled him with a ceaseless
180 STEATHMOEE.
and bitter fear ever gnawing at his peace; he was
silenced, from tlie grip tliat held him, Yaldor would
never again be free to come forth and lift up the veil
that hung before that ghastly past ; yet, that this
secret should be in the power of one living man, how-
ever that man were stricken powerless, filled with the
deadly unrest of an ever-conscious, never-banished
dread, the heart which, through a long life, had never
learned before what it was to fear. In Lucille's pre-
sence this was lulled, in her absence it fastened on
him resistlessly with a haunting, nameless terror. For
Marion Vavasour, too, lived ! of her he could learn
nothing, save that she had recovered in the peasant's
hut that had given her shelter, and had gone from
White Ladies ; gone none knew whither ; she lived,
though lost in the desert of the world. Danger had
risen once ; never more could he feel secure it would
not rise again, not again to be thus grappled with and
hurled down before its touch could reach Lucille.
It was this which made him hasten his marriage to
its earliest; he felt that her life was unsafe until
placed beyond the power of man to sever from him,
until guarded by him with the title and the power of
a husband.
, It was still but autumn, not a month from the hour
when he had first betrayed to her his own love, when
he stood with her the night before their marriage-
day, looking on that life which still seemed to him too
pure for the grosser touch of passion ; with which his
EVIL DONE THAT GOOD MAY COME. 181
owii was well-nigh to him as much profanity, and
desecration, as the love of other men had seemed.
There are lives in their first youth, ere childhood is
wholly left, ere womanhood is one-half learned, which
look too heaven-lent for any love, even the noblest and
the best. Lucille's was one.
Without, that night, the seas ran high, and dark
waves were flung against the granite headlands, and
mnds were wild among the tossing gorse ; but where
they stood in solitude there were warm scented air,
and delicate bright hues, and flowers in all their
summer blossom, and she neither saw nor knew the
darkness of the night. His kiss was on her lips, his
voice was in her ear.
" And you are happy 1 " Strathmore murmured, as
he bent over her. Eestlessly, wistfully, incessantly
he asked this of one who took all her joy from him
the question whose answer he knew so well ! But
of that answer he was never weary never weary of
watching as he did now the rich love-light in her face,
the gladness in her smile, while she nestled closer in
his breast as to her best-loved, best-trusted shelter,
half shy, half ashamed still, in the awe and beauty of
her new and wondering joy.
She was happy happy through him. Strathmore
asked no more than this, and asked not this for his
own sake. For, in his remorse, and in his expiation,
the haughty arrogance of his nature was smitten
down, humbled to lowest depths ; and where he
182 STEATHMOEE.
stood, on that marriage eve, witli her lips against his
cheekj and her life sheltered on his heart, he bowed
his head over her with an unspoken prayer :
" For her sake in his trust oh, God ! that I may
have power to keep her thus for ever ! "
And in his heart a voice spoke that voice so often
stifled, so often disobeyed, so often rebelled against
as weakness, that voice which men call conscience.
" Why was evil done that good might come ? Sin
added yet again to sin is but barrier piled on barrier
between a soul and its atonement."
It was noon on the day of the solemnisation of his
marriage, and Strathmore stood among some of the
proudest of his order, speaking on the trifles of the
hour mth his habitual soft, low, slight laugh. The
accustomed serenity was on his face, the courtly
smile upon his lips, the languor in the cold, har-
monious music of his voice ; they saw in him but
one of themselves, a subtle statesman, a consummate
com'tier, pursuer of a lofty power, reaper of a ripe
ambition ; they saw no change in him. But in his
heart was the restless fever of a passionate disquiet,
born from the gnawing consciousness of traitorous
infamy wrought that good might be its offspring.
" God is my witness no impulse of passion, no
vileness of self-pity, no thought of my own peace
actuated me it was for her, for her alone," he told
himself perpetually, and said aright; for passion he
would have trampled out, self-pity was a weakness
EVIL DONE THAT GOOD MAY COME. 183
that was unknown to him, and his longing to fulfil
the trust of Erroll was holy, sincere, and without
taint, though its fruit and its action were eiTor. Yet
a terrible unrest was on him ; a sickening dread pos-
sessed him he who had feared the laws neither of
nature nor of man. Was the darkness of his own life
fit to blend with the pure dawn of hers ? Was a
hidden sin such shield as should have guarded her ?
He thrust thought from him, and it would return.
He bade the past be buried, and it rose again. He
strove to behold but the fairness of the future, and
the dead years swarmed around and mocked him.
He was master of all men save of himself ! and as
he stood there, in his easy and courtly calm, on him
were a foreboding, a fevered and nameless fear,
unseen of men.
As Lucille came into his presence these were for-
gotten, and when he looked on her, he remembered
nothing but the young love that was his own.
They who were gathered there were world-worn,
languid, cold to much, indifferent to all; men and
women who wore the purples of the patrician, and
had long forgot the creeds, even where they still kept
the years, of youth. Yet there were none among
them who, seeing her on her bridal morning, were not
touched to something of mournful and unbidden ten-
derness at sight of that fair and opening life. They
did not know why they felt thus, they did not seek to
know ; thus, long ago, they might have felt, looking
on the dawn of an earlv shadowless day, rising in
184 STKATHMOKE.
summer liglit, conscious themselves liow soon that
day must die, scorched by noon heats, and sunk in
shadows of the nic^ht.
The low, sad lulling of the seas, beating on the
sands without, sounded audibly through the stillness
in Silver-rest. Without, the autumn day was wild,
and fitful, and tempestuous, while the grey curlews
flew with startled cries over the surf, and the yellow
leaves of the scattered gorse were whirled upon the
wind. But within, the chambers were filled with
delicate colouring, with fair women, with the gleam
of diamonds and sapphires, with the scent of a
myriad of exotics, while the light fell warm and mellow
about Lucille, and on the white coronal of the virginal
and bridal flowers. As he bowed before her, and,
leading her out, took his place beside her, the courtli-
ness of his habitual manner, softened and tinged by
the infinite tenderness he bore to her, no memory
was on him then save of her beautiful youth, as her
eyes drooped, full of shy dreamy lustre, and her face
flushed in her soft awe, in her sweet shame. Her
heart was subdued at the weight of its own joy.
What had she done, she thought, that she should
share his life as no other had ever shared it ; that she
alone, of all the world, should be thus loved and
blessed by Heaven and by him ?
The words of the marriage ceremonial commenced,
while the ocean filled the stillness with the plaint of
its mournful melody.
" I require and charge you both, as ye will answer
EVIL DONE THAT GOOD MAY COME. 185
at tlie dreadful day of judgment, when the secrets of
all hearts shall be disclosed "
The syllables fell slowly and solemnly on the
hushed ah', charging the confession of all sin or
knowledo-e which could sever the lives that would be
bound in one ; and he who heard them, while on his
soul was the secret which uttered would part their
lives for ever, stood silent : the words rolled onward,
echoed by the melancholy burden of the seas where
they broke, wave upon wave, on the distant shore.
He was silent ; and what other lips could tell the
crime of his buried past ? None there. He had said,
"Let the dead past bury its dead," and the dead
speak not.
Once only his face lost its enforced look of calm
and grave tranquillity ; it was when her hand touched
and lay within his. Then the ritual which was
uttered was lost on his memory ; the scene that
was around him grew unreal ; the surging of
the seas beat and throbbed through his brain; his
eyes shrank from the young loveliness beside him,
and his voice, as it pledged her a husband's vows,
sounded hollow in his ear. What he saw was the
upward gaze of the dying man whom he had slaugh-
tered, what he heard were the faint broken words,
which, even in death, had forgiven him ; and for
one instant on his face came that look, hunted,
terrible, guilt-stricken, which had come there when
in the mists of the sunrise in the years long gone,
he had read the message of the dead, the message
186 STEATHMOEE.
of pardoiij which had written him out for ever in
his own sight a murderer. In that hour it was
not Lucille of whom he thought, it was not Lucille
whom he saw ; it was the friend whom he had loved
and slain.
The moment passed ; Strathmore recovered the
control so rarely broken. His hand closed upon hers,
his voice fell serenely on the silence, he bowed his
head beside her, and unarrested the mamage words
rolled on through the quiet calm, that was only filled
with the dreamy lulling of the seas. His love was
pledged her as her husband's. His hand closed on
hers as the guardian of her life.
" Those whom God hath joined together let no man
put asunder."
On the deep stillness the words were uttered which
bound their lives in the bond which the world would
not sever, nor death annul.
And with her face flushed, as with the glory of her
future, and luminous with the angel-light that Dante
saw upon the face he loved in the Vision of the
Paradiso, Lucille looked upward in his eyes his
Wife.
187
CHAPTEK XI.
THE ROSES OF THE SPRING.
It was the eai'ly springtide of the year.
The broad sunny waters by Sheen lay cool and
tranquil in the light ; the woodland was in its first
glad freshness ; the glades and gardens sweeping to
the edge, and the white glistening walls of villas
through the trees, were warm in the noon brightness ;
and it was restful and lovely here, in a bend of the
stream, beechen-sheltered, and with mossy islands
brealdng the wide river, and drooping their willows
lazily into its waves. Down the stream floated a
boat shaped like the Greek feluccas, a graceful water-
toy, with sails like the silver seagull's whigs, and gold
arabesques glistening on its white carved sides, and
azure cushions piled up on its couch ; the nautilus-
barge of a Nereid were not more daintily fair. And
on the shore, under the sheltering trees, a woman sat
wearily watching its com'se, half in apathy, half in
188 RTEATHMOEE.
fascination. She was tired, travel-worn, liaggard,
heart-sick, where she sat, resting drearily there, look-
ing out with sunken, sun-blind eyes blankly over the
stretch of the waters ; and she gazed as though bound
by a spell at the joyous sweep of the vessel : they
were in a contrast so strange she, the bitter, hope-
less, beggared woman, crouching in the shadow, and
that bird-like boat winging its way through the light,
with the sun on its snow-white sails.
And she thought of her past, when her course
through life had been proud, and patrician, and cloud-
less, and in the light of a noontide sun, like the course
of that boat through the waters !
Nearer and nearer glided the Greek barge, while
on its cushions lay a young girl in the first years of
her youth, the awnings of azure silk above her head,
a pile of hothouse roses lying in her lap, the sunlight
falling on the fairness of her face, bright with a
softer glory still the glory of a life without a
shadow, of a joy without a wish. She who sat on the
shore looked and noted her with envying, evil gaze ;
she knew nothing of her, but youth, joy, peace, the
purples of the aristocratic order, the gladness of a
loveliness gracious and beloved, these were accursed
and abhorrent in the sight of the Outcast : they had
once been her own, though now there waited for her
but the sepulchre of Age, the grave of Beggary.
Nearer yet floated the fairy felucca, as though
bearing a Water-Fay to her river home, to her golden
throne reared in the snowy bell of the lotus-flower ;
THE ROSES OF THE SPRING. 189
floated till it was moored at a landing-stair close to
where the solitary wanderer sat, who never moved,
but gazed still, with the stupor of weariness at the
toy-barge and its freight, as its young Queen rose from
her azure nest, and passed over the carpets her at-
tendants threw down before her feet, with a group of
girl-patricians like herself, sunny as the morning.
Her white and delicate skirts almost swept the
dust-stained dress of the lonely woman where she sat ;
and she looked down on her compassionately, pausing
with that generous and loving pity for all who sor-
rowed and were in need, that was the divine instinct
of a nature which, in the fulness of its own gladness,
would fain have decreed that none should suffer. Of
her she had no recollection.
" You are ill ? " she asked gently, while the odour
of the roses that filled her hands was wafted to the
travel-tired wanderer.
" I am very weary ! "
The words had a heart-sick depth of misery, and
the voice which uttered them was strangely contrasted
with the want and desolation of her loneliness sweet,
rich, and full of music still.
The contrast struck upon the young girl's ear, and
she paused, while her fair eyes, in whose depths the
sunlight lay, gazed down on the hollow, sunken, hag-
gard face at whose look she shuddered, even while it
touched her to yet deeper pity, for there were in it
something of fearful beauty, of wild grace, that
nothing could destroy save death itself.
190 STEATHMOEE.
"Let me aid you/' slie said, stooping, while she
dropped some gold into the wanderer's lap, the sweet
and gracious compassion of the words robbing the alms
of all bitterness that might lie to poverty in the charity
of w^ealth. " This is but little ; but if you come up
to the house, we may be able to relieve you more."
. The woman looked upon her, still with a blank
stupor and an evil envy blended in her ; and the sun
shone on them together; the wanderer, with the
darkness of desolation and the shame of many years
upon her, and the young girl, with the sun bright on
her fan' and fragile loveliness, on the fragrant burden
of flowers that she bore, on the light gold of her
perfumy hair, and on the beautiful smile that was
less upon her lips than in her eyes, in their deep and
happy radiance.
She moved to pass onward from the Pariah who
crouched there in the beechen shadow; but as she
moved she saw the look, which had flashed with some-
thing of proud, shrinking pain as the gold had fallen
into her lap, fasten on and follow, w^ith wistful, tliirsty
gaze, the blossom and the fragrance of the roses;
such a look as an exile gives on a foreign soil to
flowers he remembers in his native land, wiiither he
can never again return. With an impulse and gesture
of exquisite grace, she gave the rich clusters to the
lonely and travel-worn wanderer.
" You love flowers ? Take them, they will comfort
you."
While the softness of the pitying words still lin-
THE ROSES OF THE SPEING. 191
gered on the air, in charity more angel-like than the
grudging charities of earth, she went onward with
her fair, bright group of girlish aristocratic youth,
soon lost to sight in the foliage of the villa woodlands ;
and Marion Vavasour sat in the gloom beside the
reedy waters, with the roses lying in her lap, and
their dreamy fragrance heavy with the perfume of
the Past.
They were the flowers of her sovereignty, the flowers
of her symbol; she had loved them with the poetic and
artistic fancy which so strangely mingled with her
panther cruelty, her mui'derous wantonness ; a thou-
sand buried hours lay coiled for her in the shut leaves
of the moss-laden buds, a thousand memories uprose
for her with the rich sweetness of theu^ odorous dews,
her youth, her loveliness, her power, all the golden
glories that were for ever dead were sepulchred for
her in the closed core of those scarlet roses.
Beggared by the arrest which had spared her liberty,
but had confiscated all that she possessed and had ba-
nished her the city ; beggared more utterly yet by the
wreck of the vessel in which she had been bound for
the New World ; she, who had been more cruel in the
days of her triumph than was ever beast of the desert
goaded and ravening for prey, had sunk to the lowest
depths of misery, of keen and bitter want, of wild
and impotent despair; and, stiU denying God, be-
lieved at last in Retribution,
And she sat there looking blankly and blindly
down on the fresh fragrant roses that the compassion
192 STEATHMOKE.
of a soilless life had laid upon those hands crime-
stained as the murderer's palm ; and she drank in, as
with a desert-thirst, the fragrance that bore to her the
perfume of her Youth, the fragrance of the emblems
of her Past !
A step roused her : she looked up, wearily, from
her stupor :
" Who was it gave me these ? "
He who was passing, an old ferry-boatman, paused :
" An angel on earth a'most, God keep her ! The
great minister's young bride. He's cold as ice to look
at, but they do say that he just worships her."
"TFAoisshe?"
There was a terrible hurrying eagerness in the
quiver of her voice.
" His lordship's wife, I tell ye, the Lady Cecil
Strathmore."
" Strathmore ! "
The boatman had passed onward, and he did not
hear the echoed name, in whose dry, stifled cry ran
the intensity of hate. From where she sat in the
heart-sickness of fatigue and of privation, she sprang
up as a panther springs from its lair at scent of its
foe and its prey, her limbs once more instinct with
eager life, her form quivering with passion. She
dashed the roses down on the wet sward and trod
them beneath her feet, till their beauty was ruined,
and trampled from all likeness of itself, even as was
her own. She flung out into the river depths, with
loathing gesture, the gold that had been given by
THE EOSES OF THE SPRING. 193
that tender and gentle pity ; in want and weariness,
in poverty and despair, footsore, and with none to
give her bread, a wanderer, and knowing not when
night should fall where she should lay her head, she
cast out to the waters' waste the alms that were of his
wealth !
The insanity of a blind, reckless, cruel hate pos-
sessed her ; the hate, long-chained, baffled, powerless
to find its vengeance ; the hate which was athirst to
coil itself with deadly poison-folds about the life that
was omnipotent and honoured amidst men, and hiss
back in his ear the words by which he once had
doomed her : " Such mercy as you gave, I give to
you no more ! "
At last, at last, she had learned where to strike ;
and though her hands were empty now, some weapon,
that would deal the death-blow to his life through
what he loved, would not be long unfound.
To that reckless and tigress lust, what were the
gentleness of the youth which had paused to pity her
suffering, the divine compassion which had succoured
the stranger and the desolate ? to the soul that was
seared with evil and envy, and the deep guilt of mur-
derous passions, they were but as oil to the burning,
but as fuel to flame.
When the night fell over the river-maisonnette,
which had been one of the bridal-gifts of her husband
to Lucille, and where they came at the close of most
weeks, that in the world she had now entered she
VOL. III.
194 STEATHMOEE.
should not wholly lose the freshness and the solitude
in which she had dwelt from infancy, and which
had made waters, and woodlands, and the sweep of
free forest winds, the life of her life, Marion Vavasour,
unseen, made her way through the aisles of the
gardens, stealing with noiseless footfall, as the cheetah
through the jungles.
Her youth for ever dead, her loveliness for ever
lost, no end left for her but beggared misery and
wretched age, and the death-bed of the homeless and
the outcast, she had but one goal, one passion, one
future revenge ; and like the cheetah she could
crouch, waiting with untired patience for the hour
when her spring could never miss. Love she had
never known, save for her own beauty, her own guilty
power ; but hate, the cruel, cowardly, wanton, venge-
ful nature of Marion Vavasour a woman in her
^\dckedness as in her weakness, in her crimes as in her
cowardice knew in its deadliest and most ruthless
desire. Not with philtre or with steel had she any
thought to destroy what she hated ; her hand would
have shaken there, for her heart would have shrank
from the physical peril that would have recoiled on
herself ; true to her sex, she thirsted for a more cruel
and a more craven vengeance ; she longed to destroy
by some subtler torture to say to him, as he had said
to her, " You shall live to suffer ! "
She made her way, shunning detection, through the
still, cool avenues and gardens, where the starlight
was trembling in the white spray of fountains, and
I
I
THE EOSES OF THE SPEING. 195
the linden-leaves were filling tlie night with their
odour. She had no purpose, no object, save to watch
as the snake watches what he dares not attack ; save
to feed, by looking on its goal, the hate which fast-
ened full as brutally on the young life which had
been filled with merciful compassion for her lone-
liness and poverty, as on his which had bade her perish
in the darkness of the waters, and left her to sink
downward to her grave.
Her eyes gazed round as she moved onward ; the
scent of the air, the gleam of the statues among the
foliage, the voices of the nightingales thrilling through
the silence they belonged to her Past ! and the soul
of this woman, hungering for her lost life, knew no
passion but to destroy those who now dwelt in the
paradise from whose gates the flaming sword of a
pitiless vengeance had driven her forth to the desert.
She stole on, shrouded by the fitful moonlight, till
she found her way to a marble terrace, where some of
the windows still stood open to the night ; and,
sheltered by the ilex shrubs, Marion Vavasour crept
nearer and nearer, and gazed into Lucille's bridal
home. Kneeling there, she could see the long vista of
the lighted chambers, which had a few moments past
been filled by the guests of the Cabinet Minister, a
small, choice gathering, the roll of whose carriages
still echoed through the still night that was stealing
into the Sabbath dawn. The dank dews fell chill
upon her brow, her limbs were stiff and weary, she
had no clanship save with the great outcast multitudes,
o2
196 STEATHMORE.
whose name is legion and whose portion wretchedness;
and she gazed upon the light and luxury and beauty,
the rich colouring and delicate hues, and gleaming
marbles veiled in the warm clusters of countless blos-
soms, where what Strathmore loved, lived in his
honour and his shelter, in the grace of earliest youth,
and in the pui'ples of grandest power.
A sickly and deadly envy shivered through her
veins, and she stretched nearer and nearer, as the
reared snake darts from out the shadow its hooded
head and poisoned barb.
She, kneeling there without, saw Strathmore in the
light within ; and where he stood his head was bowed,
while on the coldness of his face was that fond warmth
which never came there save for one. They were alone,
and Lucille leaned against him ; her arms were wound
about his neck, and while his hand caressed the light
wealth of her hair, her eyes looked upward into his
with that love which was the holiest and fairest thing
which had entered in with the ambitions, the passions,
and the remorse, of an unscrupulous and erring life.
They were so near, that she who watched without,
could see the look with which the eyes that had spoken
their mute merciless doom to her when he had loosed
her to the fury of the seas, gazed down on the young
loveliness gathered to his bosom ; so near, that she
could hear the voice which had bade her perish in the
devouring waters, soften to more than woman's ten-
derness, in answer to the fond words whose happy
murmur had filled the silence :
THE KOSES OF THE SPEING. 197
" All ! if it were not to wish you less honoured and
less great, I should wish we were always alone, and
that Lucille never lost you to the world?"
" Lucille never loses me to the world, for never is
she one hour from my thoughts, though the world
claims my time and my presence."
And as those answering words echoed on the still-
ness of the midnight to the ear of the hidden watcher
without, she saw at last the single place in his armour
of proof where, if one poisoned arrow ever pierced,
the mailed and kingly life must reel and fall ; and a
whisper hissed from her own blanched, fevered lips,
" He loves her he loves her!"
Through the stillness there trembled the low sigh
of that perfect joy which, like the hush of noon, is
silenced by its own intensity, as Lucille looked up-
ward to his face which, cold and changeless for all
others, to her ever wore that gentle tenderness which,
so long hers from her guardian, was a hundred-fold
hers from her husband.
"Ah ! how beautiful it is to live !" she murmured;
and the words of happiness which had never known
even a dream of pain, of love which lent its own
divinity to all existence, stole to the strained ear and
thirsty hate of the woman with whom to live had been
to sin, and who had but one seared and cruel passion
left the passion to destroy.
" Thank God it is so for you, my darling ! "
"Forws?"
" ^ For us ' yes. For me while for you."
398 STEATHMOKE.
She nestled nearer to his heart, while her voice was
still hushed in its deep dreamy sweetness.
" I wish there were no suffering for any ? I cannot
bear to think that there is so much pain on earth;
can you ? I saw a woman in want to-day ; I wish
you had been with me. Her face has haunted me
ever since ; it looked so lost, so full of evil, yet so full
x)f weariness. Why is it that some faces look like
that?"
" Do not seek to know, my child ! you could never
even dream."
" She grieved me, too," pursued Lucille, while the
light from above fell white and soft upon her where
she leaned against him, her head resting on his breast,
the pearls woven in her shining hair, the costly
laces of her delicate dress trailing on the floor, with
bright flowers flung here and there upon them, "She
sat so haggard and so desolate by the river all alone.
It must be so terrible to be alone! I thought the
veiy poorest liad some one to love them ? "
" But she was left less desolate when you had seen
her, Lucille?"
He knew that her nature had no pleasure greater
than in mvinof rest and succour to all who were in
need, and he let her spend his wealth as widely as
she would in charity ; every fair and gracious mercy
traced to her, every blessing that fell on her from
the lives she aided, rejoiced him.
" I am afraid nothing could help her very much,"
she answered him, musingly, in the voice which had
THE EOSES OF THE SPRmG. 199
become to liim the sweetest music that earth held, it
was so full of joy ! " She looked, so longingly at my
roses ; they might have been the faces of familiar
friends ! I gave them to her, for I thought they might
comfort her if she loved them as I do."
Over his face passed a shadow of startled fear, of
disquietude, heavy though nameless ; he knew not
why nor what he dreaded.
'^ Yom- roses ! It was strange that a beggar cared
for them, Lucille ? "
"Why? Perhaps they recalled to her some hap-
pier past. Do you know I think I fancy, she is
the same woman I saw ill at White Ladies, one of
those who were shipwrecked, she whom you found me
with, that day ; you remember ? "
He shuddered, and drew her to liim with a gesture
of passionate tenderness.
" Do not speak to strange people, my darling,
he said, rapidly and uneasily. " You are too young
to discern whom it is fitting you should notice. Let
none, save those I sanction, ever have access to you."
She raised her face, illumined with her tender and
beautiful smile :
" Ah ! I love to have anything to promise you and
to obey you in ! I wish you gave me more, then you
would know how Lucille loves you."
He bowed his head, and kissed the lips which had
so sweet an eloquence for him, and drew her with fond
care from the breath of the night breeze as it swept
through the opened casements ; his frame, firm knit
200 RTEATHMOKE.
as steel, and braced in his youth by desert heats and
ocean storms, felt even the slight chillness in the
summer wind, since it might have danger for the
early life he cherished.
And she who watched without with burning,
jealous eyes, while the darkness brooded over her
hiding-place, where she crouched as a serpent coils
beneath the leaves, saw him lead Lucille through the
long vista of light and warmth, of renaissance hues,
and tropic foliage, until their forms passed from her
sight, and she heard the distant closing of a door
falling behind them. Yet she knelt there still, shel-
tered by the leaves, and with her face looking out
into the starlight, haggard and lit with a terrible
baffled passionate desire, ravening for its prey ; knelt
there until the light died out from the windows, and
no sound stirred the silence but the gentle lulling of
the river, and all was still in the hush of sleep.
1*he night was serene, the winding waters mur-
mured in tranquil measure on their way, the stars
shone down in holy solemn peace; and as the poi-
sonous snake steals, dark and noiseless, through the
gentle night where none behold its pestilential trail,
Marion Vavasour stole through the dark shelter of
the leaves, looking backward, ever backward, to where
were sleep, and rest, and soft dreams only stirred by
as soft a caress, while like the death-hiss of the snake
gliding to destroy, the whisper hissed from her set
lips : " He loves her ! he loves her ! "
201
CHAPTER XII.
"SUR l'aVENIR INSENSlfi QUI SE FIE?"
The light of a fire, made of wood of aloes brought
from the East, and filling the air with its incense-
like perfume, shed its flickering brightness over a
room luxurious as any palace chamber in the Arabian
Nights. Hangings of azure silk, arabesques of gold,
rich-hued Guido heads, and delicate white carvings,
art-trifles of rarest beauty, and flowers scattered in
profusion everywhere, bright in hothouse blossom,
were lit by the fire-g1eam into such a mingled mass
of colouring as artists would have worshipped in its
chiar'oscuro. Not less would they have loved the
face on which the fire shed its glow ; the thoughtful
brow, the spiritual eyes, the lips on wdiich was a
dreaming smile. There was a light upon her face
that had never been there, there was a perfection in
202 STEATHMOEE.
her loveliness that it had never before reached, as
Lucille leant back in a low chair, gazing into the
bright wood embers, while a large greyhound lay
stretched at her feet, and the warm glow played upon
her gold-flecked hair, in the twihght of the spring day
which had grown chilly in the great squares of patri-
cian West I^ondon, six months after her marriage.
She was alone, but her reverie was sweeter than the
companionship of any save of one, and her thoughts
were fairer dreamland than any poet's song or ro-
mancist's story could have told her. Joyous, and with-
out even passing shade, as her caressed and guarded
youth had been from the days of her earliest memory,
it seemed to Lucille that she had never known happi-
ness until now; now that she was his own, of his
name, in his home, unsevered from him, and dear to
him as no living thing had ever been.
It was growing very dusk, but the half-light, the
uncertain lustre crossed and deepened by the shadows,
suited her imamnative and meditative nature. Had
her own life known a touch of twilight, she would
have learnt to find the twiliglit hour unendurable ;
her days were full of sunlight, and she loved the
weird poetic pause between the day and night.
Suddenly the greyhound rose with a deep bay,
shaking his silver chain, Lucille lifted her head in
eager listening gladness; a step they both knew
echoed without, the door opened at the far end of the
chamber, the portiere was flung back, and Strathmore
entered. In an instant she had crossed the vast
" SUE l'avenie insens^ qui se fie ?" 203
length of the apartment, and had thrown herself into
his outstretched arms ; her face flushed with delight,
her eyes gazing into his as though they had been
parted not for hours but years.
" My darling. ! my darling ! " murmured Strath-
more, as he bent over her ; and in his eyes as they
looked down upon her it might be read that in that
moment at least he was happy ; it might be seen how
deeply this man could love, who, by a fatal error, had
believed himself as cold, as he was, of a truth, inex-
orable.
He led her forward to where the fragrant aloes'
flame flung out its ruddy heat upon the hearth, and
as he sank into a couch beside the fire, she threw
herself down at his feet, resting her bright head
against him, while his arm was still about her. For
the first time in his life his home was sacred and wel-
come to Strathmore ; before, it had been to him but
a residence in which to sleep, to dine rarely, save
when he entertained the world, to keep the state and
pomp requisite to his public position, and to give his
ministerial banquets and receptions ; now^ it was dear
to him, for it was also hers.
" What, you were all alone, my child, and in the
twihght, too ? " he said, fondly, as his hand caressed
her liair.
She looked up, wdiile the firelight shone in her eyes
and on the radiance of her face.
" I w^ould always rather be alone when you are not
v ith me. It is solitude without you wherever I am,
204 STKATHMORE.
and if I am quite alone there is nothing to break my
thoughts of you."
" Lucille ! you should not love me so well."
She looked up, still with a smile which spoke be-
yond words.
" Love is all I have to pay you in. I cannot give
too much."
" Pay me ! I am the debtor."
Her caresses, her tenderness, her infinite devotion
to him, were ever new, ever sweet to Strathmore ;
with any other he might probably have been satiated
and wearied before now, with Lucille he was never
tired of gazing on the fairness of her face, and he
could never hear too many of her fond words. He
had loved her ere he had wedded her, he had loved
her far more since.
" As I said the other night, if it were not to wish
you less great, I could wish we were always alone,"
she wdiispered liim, while she lay at his feet, making
a bright artistic picture with the greyhound at her
side on the soft, rich-hued skins upon the hearth.
" I could wish, too, that I had never to leave you,"
he answered her, tenderly, his hand still wandering
over the light gold of her hair. " Well, we will be
alone for a time ; there is nothing that needs me im-
peratively now, and we need not go to the Queen's
ball till late. You shall have an hour or two to
yourself, Lucille."
Her face beamed with delight.
" Ah, I am so glad ! I feel how proud and glorious
" suR l'avenie insens qui se fie?" 205
it is to bear your name when I am with you in the
world, but I love better still to be with you alone.
Others are your companions as well there ; but I am
the only one who shares your solitude."
He smiled ; the intensity of her affection for him,
too great in its usurpation of all her life and thoughts,
never alarmed him, as it might well have done, for
her : he only saw in it the fulness of her happiness
through him, the completeness with which her happi-
ness was merged in and dependent on him, and thus also
in it the completeness of his atonement to her father.
The cool and daring nature of Strathmore was not
one to fear the fatal adversities of chance. Accident is
chiefly dreaded by women ; by men rarely, by Strath-
more never. When the sin that he had sinned to
Valdor for her swept over him with a remorse scarce
ever lulled, he strove to thrust it aside ; he would have
taken fresh guilt to his soul to have spared Lucille
one passing touch of the knowledge of sorrow.
Lucille leaned nearer against him, while a warmer
flush rose to her cheeks.
" There is something I want to ask you may I ? "
" May you ! " he repeated, with a smile. " My own
darling ! have you need to ask that ? What is there
I ever refuse you, Lucille ? "
" Oh no, no ! Nothing that I could beg you to
give or to do ; but this is different something I want
to ask you of yourself."
" Of myself ? Say what you will, my love."
He thought she alluded to political matters, for
206 STEATHMOEE.
Lucille's intelligent and highly-cultured mind ren-
dered her very far in advance of her actual years ;
and all childlikej guileless, and poetic as her nature
was, she embraced and entered into his career with a
depth of comprehension and of sympathy which made
her no unfitting companion of a politician's life.
^' I have never asked you before ; but I think you
will tell me now now that I am so near to you," she
said, softly, and half shyly, while the colour deepened
in her face as she spoke the last words. Her reverence
for her guardian had been so interwoven with her life,
that it was still inseparably mingled with the fuller,
freer, and still fonder tenderness she bore him as her
husband. " I want you to tell me" and her voice
sank very low, while her arm stole round his neck
" to tell me of that cruel woman whom they say that
you once loved ? "
Strathmore started violently, as if a snake had
stung liim; a look of terror and of horror glanced
into his eyes. As the firelight shone upon his face
and hers they were in strange contrast; the one
worn, pale, blanched with a great fear, and dark with
all the memories of the past that flooded on him with
that single question ; the other bright and fair in all
the loveliness of earliest youth, its delicate colouring
flushed, her violet eyes beaming, humid and eloquent,
as her shining hair brushed his cheeks.
"Of her? of her^ My God! What do you
know of her ? "
In the passionate agitated words, to which a ghastly
" SUR l'aVENIR INSENSIi; QUI SE FIE?" 207
dread gave the first sternness, the first harshness which
had ever tinged his words to Lucille, the cool wisdom
of the statesman was forgotten, the truth betrayed ;
he had not remembered with what ease her question
might have been eluded, her innocence blinded and
misled.
Lucille looked at him ; her eyes startled and filled
with wistful pain, her colour faded, her face full
of self-reproach and sorrow. She saw that he was
wounded and by her ! and she heard in his voice
the first accent of anger that had ever fallen on her
ear. She did not know how far removed from anger,
how far worse than his worst anger could have been,
were the memory and the dread which gave his
words their first and momentary severity. She threw
herself on his heart with loving, broken whispers of
regret and grief ; it was the first time pain had ever
risen up between them the first time she had ever
known the misery of his displeasure.
" Forgive me ! do forgive me ! I meant no harm ;
I did not know ! Oh, for the world I would not
grieve you ! "
The tears that shone in her eyes, and quivered in
her voice, recalled him to himself ; he shuddered
already must his accursed past fall on her, and bring
sorrow to her even through him !
" Lucille, my darling ! I have nothing to forgive.
You have done no harm you have not grieved me.
You have asked me nothing but what you have a
right to ask. It is only only For God's sake
208 STKATHMOEE.
tell me what made you say that then what made you
speak of her ? "
Lucille lifted her eyes to his, in which he read
every thought, mirrored as in a glass.
" I only heard of her what Lady Chessville and
Lady Castlemere said, long ago, last year at White
Ladies ; and "
" I know, I know," broke in Strathmore, hastily,
for his mother had told him of that conversation.
" But why should you "
" I could not tell you what made me think of her
then ; but I often do, because because I have longed
to ask you if it were true she was so dear to you, and
if it is from any memory of her that you cannot bear
the roses, and call them the flowers of sin ? I longed
to ask you if if you regret her now, and if you loved
her better than you love Lucille ? "
Her voice shook a little in the last words, and her
head was bowed on his breast as she whispered them ;
of restless jealousy, of evil curiosity, her radiant and
ethereal life knew no taint nor shadow. But now and
then she heard a sharp quick sigh from Strathmore ;
she saw a darkness come over his face when he
thought her eyes were not upon him ; she was awak-
ened by restless murmured words in his broken sleep ;
and Lucille, who lived but for him, had wondered,
dreamily, vaguely, as she had wondered when she
had gazed out on the moonlit abbey-lands of White
Ladies, whether the regret of that dead, nameless
" SUE l'avenie insens^ qui se fie?" 209
passion, was still on him had wondered who she had
been, this traitress who had deserted him, yet whom
he had perhaps never forgotten or replaced. In her
true and childlike instinct she had not kept the fear by
her in silence to brood over its pain ; she had brought
it at once to him.
She felt him shudder from head to foot, and his
hand tremble as hers closed upon it. To speak of
Marion Vavasour to her ! and yet to the trustful
innocence of Lucille he could not lie.
His f oice was hoarse as he answered her, with a
harsh impetuous passion vibrating in it that she had
never heard there, yet which, like his violence on the
sea-shore when she was a young child, she knew in-
stinctively was not violent to her.
" For the mercy of God, do not speak of her ! I
loved her ^yes ! with such love as you cannot dream.
Heaven forbid that you should ! Let my past be !
my present is yours. My name, my home, my heart
are yom^s ; do not taint them with what is accursed,
with what is unfit for your lips ! "
Lucille lifted her head, and looked up in his eyes
with that gaze with which on the sea-shore she had
looked at him in her infancy ; her eyes were wistful,
startled, but, beyond all else, full of a deep and
yearning tenderness for him. Her lips quivered, her
colour rose; his grief was hers, and his wrongs her
own. She clung to him closely, her heart beating
thick and fast.
VOL. III. p
210 STEATHMORE.
"Was she so faithless to you, then this wicked
woman ? Oh, how could any one whom you loved
betray you !" *
"For God's sake, hush ! Her name on your lips !"
The words were muttered in his teeth, as he rose
hurriedly, putting her from him, and paced the length
of the chamber, the twilight only broken into darker
shadow by the warm flashing gleams of the fire which
shot across it, hiding his face from her. It was agony
to him, this torture of her innocent questions, of her
fond sympathy, of her tender grief at his wrongs !
His self-control was destroyed, his calmness and his
strength shattered down, all the darkness of the
tragedy hidden from her came back upon his memory,
all the inexpiable brutality of his guilt towards
Erroll seized him as in the first fresh hours when he
had stood beside the bier where the dead man lay
stretched in the summer sunlight, with Lucille's un-
conscious words ! He could not look upon her face
while she spoke to him of the assassinatress of her
father.
Unwitting of the blow she dealt him, she, who only
knew that slie had grieved him, and had called back
to him some past that was bitter in its remembrance,
sprang to him with the soft rapid flight of a bird, and
threw herself again upon his heart.
" Forgive me ! forgive me ! I did not know that I
should grieve you I, who would give my life to
spare you pain ! I had no right to ask what you had
not told me of yom'self . I was wrong, very wrong."
" SUE l'avenir insense qui se fie ?" 211
He pressed her closely to his bosom, her words of
self-reproach seemed to hhn to heap coals of fire on
his head. If she knew what that past was he " had
not told her"!
" You asked nothing but what you had a right to
ask," he said once more, while his voic, like her own,
was broken. " Leave me a moment, my own darling
a moment ; I will speak to you then."
Her eyes turned on him wistfully, beseechingly,
but not to obey him never crossed the thoughts of
Lucille ; it was the unquestioning obedience, never of
fear, wholly of love, which she rendered him. She
left him as he bade her, and stood in the light of
the fire with her head bowed on the white carved
marble. Her face was very pale, the tears hung heavy
on her lashes, her heart was touched with the first
pang that she had known since the maiTiage-day
which had given her to Strathmore. She thought
how he must have loved this woman that her mere
memory smote him thus, that for her sake alone he
had shuddered at the mere scent and sight of the
scarlet roses.
His step echoed on the silence of the chamber ; the
twilight shadows hid his face as he walked ujd and
down for some minutes ; then he approached her, and
his features, while they were yet worn and weary, had
recovered their serenity, and he drew her to him with
his accustomed tenderness as he stooped and kissed her.
" My precious child, you have but asked what it is
surely your due to know," he said, gently and gravely,
p2
212 STEATHMOEE.
with that perfect self-command which never, save for
a few moments, deserted him. " You have a right
to ask everything of me ; I have a right to answer ;
and I rejoice at nothing more than that no thought
even which passes through your mind should be con-
cealed from me. Confide in me freely never more
so than when your doubts are of me."
Lucille lifted her head in eagerness, her cheeks
flushed again, her eyes full of love.
"They were not doubts of you. How could I
doubt you ever? what could I doubt you in? It
was only that I doubted ^"
" What ? " he said gently, as she hesitated.
"That that," whispered Lucille, softly and swiftly,
" that you have never loved me as you once loved lierT
A quick shudder ran through him; but his self-
control, freshly reconquered, was not lost again.
" You thought truly, Lucille," he said, gravely.
" In you I love innocence in her I loved guilt. Is
there matter for envy for you, there, my guileless
child, who cannot even dream what such guilt is ? "
Lucille's face grew awed and wistful while the
thoughtful shadow which was ever more or less upon
it deepened, but a beautiful light shone in her eyes.
" Ah, then, I am dearest to you ? "
" God is my witness, yes a thousand-fold ! And
now, while I acknowledge your right to ask of me
what you will, I, too, would ask one thing of your
love. The past is dead ; when you bid me look on it,
you bid me look back upon years that are accursed in
" SUR L'aVENIK INSENS1& QUI SE FIE?" 213
my memory." His hand, as he spoke, trembled where
it rested on her shoulder, but his voice was calm and
sustained. " The history of my madness for for her
of whom you speak, I could not tell without such
suffering as the opening of old and deadly wounds
brings with it. I ask of you to spare me that. If
you bid me endure it, I will; what you demand to
know I will not refuse to answer ; but you love me,
Lucille I think you will not force me to dwell on a
past that can have no rivalry with you, a name that
it would but pollute your innocence to learn. Am I
wrong ? "
" No, no ! I will never ask you one word again ! "
she murmured, passionately. " / bid you suffer I
Oh, my lord, my love, would Lucille be so little
worthy you ? I was wrong to say what I did. All
I longed to know was that you loved me too well
ever to regret another. I know it now I want no
other knowledge ! "
Tears so rare in Strathmore's eyes, rose in them as
he heard her words. He had judged aright her tender,
generous, and lofty nature ; he had known the chord
to strike to make her young heart vibrate and echo to
his will, but it touched him to the soul ; though from
all love, though in all justness, he was still deceiving
her, and his eyes were softened to a deep gratitude,
as before some divine and holy thing, as he bowed his
head, and let his lips rest on hers.
Thus that danger passed passed, leaving no shadow
214 STEATHMOEE.
on Lucille's life. When once her fear was unfolded,
it fled. She knew that she was alone in his heart ;
that knowledge, as she had said, was sufficient for her.
He had wished his past unasked of; she banished
even thoucjht of it from a mind which best loved to
mould itself by his law, and by his wish.
She was the incarnation of shadowless youth, fair
as the dawn, in those hours which he had promised
her they should spend alone, as she played, like the
child she was, with the greyhound on the hearth, and
sang in music like the gladness of a forest bird, and
threw herself at Strathmore's feet, while the fragrant
aloes' flame gleamed on her face, and she told him
of a hundred poetic thoughts, and fairy fancies, and
pure ambitions, that lived in him and saw in him
the glory of their dreams. The evil of his past had
touched, but glanced harmless off her, leaving no
memory and no trail behind it. If her life could but
be kept thus !
/// vague, disquiet, nameless dread had fastened
on him since those innocent questions, which had
sought unwittingly to unveil the tragedy, whose truth,
beheld by her, would be death, like the unveiled face
of the Medusa. The past was on him, like a fixed
and recurrent dream; and while the night brought
Lucille sleep as light, as soft, as smiling in its dreams
as the rest of infancy, his own thoughts, sleepless and
wandering through the darkness of dead years, went
ever to one memory alone the memory of Marion
Vavasour.
I
215
CHAPTER XIII.
" DIOS CONSIENTE, PEEO NO PARA SIEMPRE."
A SCORCHING noon burnt the vast sandy plains
around Marseilles, and the great pine forests beyond
Grateloup, and the blue glittering sea had no mo-
tion along the whole line of southern shore, from
where the olive woods of Monaco sloped down to the
waters in the east, to where the chesnuts and the
vineyards of the Western Pyrenees were withered by
the intense and cloudless sun. The heat was un-
bearable, rare even for the Midi, and it was most
stifling, most pitiless, most hateful, in its blind-
ing glare, and its burning, breathless oppression
on the dreary stone bastions, and the stone-locked
harbour of Toulon, where the galley-slaves of the
Bagne were toiling under their burdens, and working
in long files under the lash of their gardes-chiormes.
Hard, merciless labour, the toil of beasts of burden,
dragging up the sloping planks the ponderous trucks
216 STEATHMOEE.
of building-stones, or panting, like horses overladen,
under tlie chains by which they were fastened to the
timber, or the iron, or the loads of gravel that they
brought along the fortifications in the parching
desert-heat. Toil, terrible and bitter to be borne to
the limbs inured by every hardship, and to the sinews,
coarse and strong as oak fibres, of the Auvergnat or
the Nantais ; of the Cevennes charcoal-burner or the
Paris felon, who had burrowed from birth with the
rats in the Catacombs, and held his fete in the vile
saturnalia of the Quartier de I'Enfer.
Toil, by the sweat of the brow, and to the uttermost
limit of strength, to those begotten in wretchedness,
born in misery, reared in starvation, and braced to hun-
ger and to thirst, to outrage and to crime. But tortures
that were like the protracted throes of one long li%ang
death to the hands that were soft as women's ; to the
limbs that were enervated by luxury ; to the lives that
were accustomed to every delicate indulgence ; to the
pride that had never stooped to any living man, and
now wore the fetters of the galley-chain as haughtily
as it had worn the orders of a noble ; to those who were
thrown with common felons, their only sin that they
had chosen the losing side, and had been Patriots in-
stead of Placemen, or in lieu of prudent and pur-
chasable creeds, which could have altered with the
wind, had chosen, in an unheroic age, the chivalrous
code of a hopeless loyalty. The red shirt and bonnet
vert, the coarse food they would in other days have
seen their doojs turn from in diso-ust, the irons that
217
ate into their flesh, the nights of misery on their
horrible beds, the ton weights under which the
hardiest cattle would have broken down, the deadly
labour under the long burning days all these they
shared with the common criminals of the land which
they had only loved too well. And even these were
mercy beside that fell companionship which lashed
them side by side with the hideous pollutions of great
cities, with the brute greed which had taken life for a
copper coin, or a toss of brandy, with the vilest guilt
and with the lowest vice that made manhood deformity
and the world a hell.
One of these waiting, as he had been waiting
well-nigh for a year, deportation to Cayenne ma-
nacled to a gaunt Liegois, who had been sent to the
galleys for arson, was dragging a load of sand, fresh
dug from the excavations, the ropes that fastened him
to his burden cutting his flesh as his shafts cut a
galled horse, the sun scorching to blisters his bared
shoulders, the irons locked upon his ankle and his
wrists, his taskmaster behind him to revenge each
laggard step, each pause when in the heat he sickened
and reeled under the weight, with a sharp scourge of
the lash as to a disobedient hound.
Bound with criminals, and sunk lower than the
dogs, stripped to the waist, anti weighted with fetters,
with his hair shorn away, and the sweat of an into-
lerable travail on his brow, the Aristocrat was still
distinguishable from those with whom he was com-
panioned ; the hands which laboured with the pick-
218 STEATHMOEE.
axe and the spade no suns conld brown, the neck
round which the cord was passed that harnessed him
to his truck no indignity could bow, the proud silence
which every outrage, jibe, and blow tried beyond
human endurance, no insult and no torture could
break. Namelessly, strangely, but wdth a chasm of
difference between them that no unity of suffering,
of labour and of bondage could bridge over, the Noble
stood out apart from the Criminals with whom he
was condemned to herd ; never made like them, never
made one of them, by any outrage, by any misery.
For all else than this, Raoul de Valdor would have
been unrecognised, and passed as a stranger, by those
who had known and loved him best, as he toiled here,
a political condamnt in the Bagne of Toulon.
A yacht had come into the Toulon harbour, driven
there overnight by a tempest, and at anchor that
glittering, sickening, torrid day ; while not a breath
stirred the drooping sails, not a touch of coolness came
over the lake-like waste of the Mediterranean ; not a
cloud, ever so slight, broke the painful steel-blue glare
of the hot skies.
The yacht had been wintering about the Morea and
the Levant, idly and purposelessly, for to the young
man who owned it it mattered little whether he were
under the skies of the East or the West, beneath the
shadow of Mount Ida, in the ^gean, or of the frown-
ing pine-crowned crags that overlook the Danube;
for the glory was gone from his life, and he was in
"digs consiente, pero no paea siempee." 219
those years which refuse to believe that although one
sun has set to-day^ another will rise with the morrow.
He cared little where he went or what he did ; and
he strolled listlessly now through the Bagne, hearing
little Avhat was said by those who showed liim over it,
though his heart was stirred to a keen, unselfish pain
as he saw the crime and the wretchedness locked in, in
the vast stone jaws of that merciless trap. He, with
liberty, youth, health, and " all the world before him
where to choose," felt that the grief which over-
shadowed his life because one desire of his heart had
been forbidden him, was egotistic, rebellious, and un-
worthy of manhood, when he looked upon the hideous
mass of crime, the intensity of human misery, the
lives, loaded -v^dth fetters and labouring like beasts of
burden, which were about him in the bastions of
Toulon, doomed beyond escape until death should
come and loose them from their chains.
" Good God ! is that creature a man ? " he said, as
he pointed out a Caliban with the frame of a giant, but
with a face so loathsome in its mastiff -like brutahty
and its low, dogged, sullen ferocity, that it well
seemed to belong to those " lower beings beneath hu-
manity," which the Spaniards of Columbus, Ojeda^
and Nicuesa, expected to find in the Terra Nuova.
"A Nantais, who cut his father and mother's
throats for a little matter of gold the old people hid in
a pitcher," answered his conductor, carelessly. " They
found him guilty, with circonstances extenuantes"
" What in Heaven's name could they be ? " asked
220 STRATHMOEE.
the young Englishman, as he moved hurriedly with
an uncontrollable horror from the place where the
parricide was.
The other shrugged his shoulders :
" Une phrase de paille^ monsieur I We do not love
capital punishment. The executioner is your pet
across the Channel ; he is not so with us."
The young man was silent, his blue eyes ranging
thoughtfully over the droves of men chained together
for such incongruous causes, for such disproportioned
crimes. Something of that profound melancholy and
despair which comes over men of great minds when
they reflect on the complexity, the vastness, and the
diverseness of evil, and see no way which can sever
justice from cruelty, or ally mercy with necessary
vigour in the law, weighed even on his naturally care-
less, unmeditative temperament. His gaze rested on
the face and form of the Parisian Noble, as he la-
boured along the plank with his truck-load of gravel.
Lionel Caryll had known him well; scarce twelve
months before they had spent months together at
Silver-rest and at White Ladies, but his eyes looked
on him without recognition, so utterly was Valdor dead
in the Galley-Slave of the Bagne. Yet that name-
less air, that look of " blood" which still lingered, at-
tracted Caryll ; he gazed at him long and with com-
passion.
" He has committed no crime ! " he said, involun-
tarily.
" DIGS CONSIENTE, PEEO NO PAEA SIEMPEE." 221
" He has committed the worst, monsieur," said his
guide, laconically.
" Impossible !" broke in the young man, with that
frank impulse natural to him. " What is he accused
of that such a man can be here, with common felons,
with assassins, and with parricides ? "
His conductor stroked his moustaches, and smiled
amusedly; he had seen many such men there, seen
them live and die there.
" That one conspired against the government."
" What ! For a mere political difference of opinion ;
for a ^"
" Chut, monsieur ! " said the polite but prudential
functionary, with a smile, " that is not the way we
talk in France."
" May I speak to him ? " asked Nello, attracted by
the pale, proud, weary, yet unconquered look of the
condainnL
His companion hesitated :
" Yes, monsieur, if you wish it," he said, after a
pause.
It was out of rule, but he was himself a considerable
person in the Bagne, who could accord such liberties
without suspicion or correction, and he knew that the
young Englishman was highly connected with several
houses of the British aristocracy. There could be no
danger, and he called the prisoner to him roughly and
imperiously, as he would have called a dog.
" Don't do that, I will go to him," said Nello,
222 STRATHMOEE.
quickly, wounded, half witli anger, half with pain,
as he felt, almost with a personal mortification, the
harsh shout of the callous custodian to the man whose
single crime had been that patriotism which, deiJjed
by us as we read the pages of classic history, is
damned by us in our own day, if shaped in oth^r
form to that in which we choose to mould it for our-
selves.
As he moved, Valdor obeyed the command, the
Liegois incendiary, with whom he was coupled, fol-
lowing him perforce ; obeyed, as one too proud for a
petty and a vain resistance, and of too knightly a
nature to show that the miserable outrages of an in-
ferior's tyranny had power to sting or gall him. But
the blood had risen to his hollow cheek, and his head
was lifted mth a certain grandeur as he approached
his taskmaster ; the man was great in his fallen mighty
in his captive's fetters, as he had never been in the
days of his rank and his brilliance. There is a ma-
jesty in Adversity, though it is a king to whose purples
the mocking multitudes will not bow down ; for the
world worships and censes only the sovereign which
it calls Success, even though oftentimes its crown is
tinsel, its path is infamy, and its treasuries are
theft.
As he drew nearer, his eyes fell on Lionel Caryll,
the colour deepened in his face, and a look of terrible
pain came into his eyes. The last time he had seen
the youth had been the night when he had believed
that Lucille loved him.
223
Nello, with tlie cliivalrous courtesy to misfortune
of high breeding and of a gentle nature combined,
lifted his hat, and bowed with a smile as engaging as
he would have given to the proudest potentate in
Europe, and with a deep respectful pity spoken in
his glance, while the Bagne official stood by smiling
in his sleeve, and thinking, " What eccentric animals
they always are, these English ! Saluer un forqat !
Bah!"
" Monsieur," he began, hesitatingly, " pardon me
that I have taken the liberty of asking to speak wdth
you. I am an Englishman, Lionel Caryll, and if I
could have the honour to serve you in any way "
"Lionel Caryll! and you do not know me!" said
the condamne, with a smile of such resigned melan-
choly that it pierced to the heart of the young man.
'' Know you ? " he echoed, wonderingty, while his
eyes dwelt on the haggard, wasted features, the w^eary,
lustreless eyes, and the browned gaunt face, shorn of
beard and hair, of the format before him. And as he
looked, slowly and incredulously, remembrance and
recognition returned on him, he grew pale as death,
and recoiled in horror.
" Yaldor ! Merciful Heaven ! "
"Even I!"
There was an intense pathos in the simple w^ords
in which the late brilliant and chivalric Noble ac-
knowledged his identity with the prisoner ofj the
Travaux Forces, in whom the friends of his lost life
could find no trace by which to know him !
224 STRATHMORE.
" Gracious God ! liow came you here ? " murmured
Caryll, while his voice shook with emotion, and the
dank dew satliered on his forehead in the shock with
which his youthful and fervid nature was struck at
meetinp^ the man whom he had known and feared as
a dazzling courtier and a powerful rival, now weighted
with irons, and leashed with a criminal in the convict
works of Toulon.
" I suffered for my cause. Many better men than
I have done as much, and more," answered Valdor,
briefly.
If he knew that one whose hand was without mercy
to strike, and whom in one mad hour he had threat-
ened when the haughty soul of Strathmore was
flung down before him in the humility of supplica-
tion, had been that which, unseen and indirectly, but
none the less surely, had sent him to his doom, Valdor
was not made of that nature which could have told
this to Strathmore' s young kinsman.
Nello gazed at him blankly, and with a paralysed
horror still; it seemed but yesterday that he had
envied this man all his versatile fascinations, all his
courtier's graces, as they were together, where they
gathered round Lucille in the lighted drawing-rooms,
or shot over the deer park, or rode through the forest
aisles of White Ladies. And now they met here in
the white blinding glare and the stone-locked prisons
of Southern France !
It was very terrible to the warm young heart of
Lionel Caryll, whose sympathies were all quick, and
" DIGS CONSIENTE, PERO NO PARA SIEMPRE." 225
whose compassion had not been worn away by the
constant claims upon it which years bring with them.
He could have shed tears like a woman at the sight
of the man before him, while all his English blood
was up in hot revolt at the tyranny which bound the
political offender in the same brutality of chastise-
ment as was incurred by the vilest criminals, by the
fratricidej the incendiary, the poisoner, and the
assassin.
" Merciful God !" he cried, passionately, " can such
things be ? What ! only because you held to the
creed of your ancestors, and wished to win back for
your King his legitimate throne, the country that was
once ruled by Henri Quatre flings you here with the
vilest criminals upon earth ! "
Valdor gave him a swift glance, which counselled
him to hold back his indignant protest, for the over-
seer of the Travaux Forces was looking suspiciously
at the young man's flushed face, and heard all the
fiery words, as Nello spoke in French.
^^ Dlos consiente, pero no para siempre^^ he answered,
in the Spanish proverb, with a mournful and re-
strained dignity, which perhaps, more than anything
else, showed how captivity and degradation had worn
away the hot impulsiveness and the brilliant in-
souciance of the French Noble, while at the same
time they had brought out in him a grandeur which
had not been there in the days of his fashion and his
fortune.
" God's vengeance should fall here, then !" mut-
VOL. III. Q.
226 STEATHMOEE.
tered Caryll, in his teeth, too ardent and too full of
impulse himself wholly to obey Yaldor's sign, though
he had seen and rapidly comprehended it. "How
long are you sentenced to this iniquitous, accursed
misery?"
"For life. I am one of the cUportes for Ca-
yenne."
'^ Cayenne ! Why, it is death itself, they say,
those pestilential swamps ! Is there no hope pos-
sible?"
" Hope does not enter here," said Yaldor, with a
smile more unutterably sad than the most bitter
lamentations could ever have been.
The young man ground his heel into the hot sand
on which they stood with a mute passionate gesture ;
he was by nature generous, sympathetic, and ready to
do battle for any wrong, however foreign to him, and
the constant action of Lucille' s mind upon his own
had lent him some of her unselfish and fervent pity
for those who suffered.
Valdor looked at him, and even on his sunburnt
face the blood rose as he leaned forward for the mo-
ment, forgetting that he was in chains.
" Tell me," he said, hurriedly. " Tidings of the
world never reach here more than they reach the
dead in then' tombs! What of Strathmore?
of ''
Caryll knew the name before which he paused.
With the rapid instinct of a lover, he had seen that
Valdor also loved her, though of what had passed
BIOS CONSIENTE, PEEO NO PAKA SIEMPEE." 227
that night under the palms he had known nothing.
His heel ground the sand under it with a fiercer force
than before, his eyes fell, he half turned away.
" My uncle has w^edded Lucille," he said, briefly ;
and, while he uttered the w^ords, all the anguish which
that marriage had cost him in its first hours tightened
afresh about him : he forgot the Bagne of Toulon ;
he forgot the men before him, and the stone walls
around him; he only remembered the love of his
youth.
Valdor answered nothing; he had knoAvn well
enough what the answ^er would be, though perhaps,
as with us all, until certainty fell like the axe of the
headsman, he had, without knowing it, hoped against
hope. He was silent; he had learnt of late to en-
dure ; but a grey pallor overspread the dark bronze
of his face, and the heavy iron fetters that bound
him to the Lieojois criminal shook ao;ainst each other
as though struck together by a sudden blow.
" Is she happy ? " said Yaldor, after a long silence,
while his voice was very low. The thoughts which
were passing within him were little dreamed by the
young man beside him thoughts of the dark tragedy
which had ushered in and still overhung the life of
Lucille.
Nello's face was still half turned away, and was
flushed w^ith the keen pain which the subject brought
him. He answered, however, with frank truth, as it
was his nature to do, and moreover, since the night
in which he had seen Strathmore's coldness broken
q2
228 STEATHMOEE.
and his pride levelled by the community of suffering,
he had felt to him as he had never done before.
" Happy? Yes. At least they tell me so^ I have
not seen her since since before her marriage, but I
know how great her love was for my uncle, and that
he would give his life to spare her a moment's pain."
" He is so dear to her ? " asked Valdor. The
chains he bore, the misery he endured from one
dawn to another, the sentence which devoted his
whole life to a fate beside which the Noble's death
upon the scaffold had been mercy, were scarce so
bitter to him as that question, for what he loved and
had for ever lost, was in the instant of its asking.
" Her life is centred in his," answered the young
man in his teeth, for he had not yet learned to speak
calmly of what had struck him a blow that for the
time had withered all the beauty of his youth. " If
harm befel him to-morrow, I believe it would be
Lucille's death."
Valdor was silent, his head drooped, his lips grew
very white where he stood, while the massive irons
that linked him to the Liegois trembled as they hung
from his wrists. Gazing do\^Ti upon the yellow glare
of the sand, he thought how wide and fearful a ven-
geance was in his hands upon the man who had con-
signed him here if liberty alone were his ! Liberty !
He shuddered as the word merely passed, mute and
colourless, through his mind; its very memory was
mockery, whilst around him were the white inexorable
" DIGS CONSIENTE, TEKO NO PAEA SIEMPEE." 229
walls, the galley-gangs, the fettered criminals of the
Toulon Bagne.
The overseer, tired of the conference, and afraid of
allowing a foreign visitor longer intercourse with one
of the galtriensj broke in, turning to Caryll :
" Monsieur, it is out of rule for a stranger to speak
with a f or9at ! I can permit the interview to last no
longer. Au travail numero six cent quarante-cinque !
Va-t-en do7ic animal ; vifeT^
Passionate words of rebuke, remonstrance, and un-
availing wrath, rushed to Caryll's lips, while his blue
eyes flashed with longing to seize the official in the
strong grip of his right hand, and hurl him down into
the midst of the excavations beside which he stood.
But a meaning, warning glance from Valdor arrested
him, as he whose whole individuality was lost in
"numero six cent quarante-cinque " bowed with. his
old grace, and with that majesty which calamity nobly
borne ever confers.
" M. Caryll, I thank you from my soul. The sight
of your face has been like water in a desert to one
who is shut in a living grave, and to whom the world
is dead."
Then, without resistance, or without sign that he
had even heard the brutal voice of his taskmaster, he
moved away to the plank where his labour awaited
him. Swift as thought, Nello followed him with
eager words of pity, sympathy, and indignant grief ;
but a hundred lynx eyes were on them, and the
230 STEATHMOEE.
glance of Valdor mutely warned him, as he would
serve him, to fall back mth those generous but rash
words unuttered, while from his own lips a single
phrase was whispered, so low that the young man
could barely catch it : " Doucement ! et conciliez
Lavigjie!^^ Lavigne was the government employe
who was conducting Nello over the Bagne.
His senses, quickened by the keenness of sym-
pathy, and by the desire which Yaldor had divined,
to serve in some way, though he had no knowledge
how, the man whom he had suddenly found in such
terrible captivity, Nello caught the cue rapidly,
though vaguely ; he fell back, letting Valdor and
Liegois return to their toil, and turned to the official
with as much carelessness and courtesy as he, no
good hand at diplomacy and deception, could assume
on the instant. He accounted to Lavigne for having
known the political offender by his having met him
at his uncle's house. Strathmore's name was too
familiar in France not to be well known even to the
Toulon officer, and was in a great measure a voucher
to him that no harm could result from the young
Englishman's recognition of " Numero six cent qua-
rante-cinque ; " and Nello obeyed, as far as he could
bring himself to do, Valdor's whispered injunction,
'^ Conciliez Lavigne,^ by entering with apparent inte-
rest into the official's explanations of the working and
the regulations of the Bagne, and by inviting him to
the inspection of his yacht, and to luncheon there on
board with him. Most surely Caryll, with not a
231
little of the pride of liis family in him, with an
honest hatred of wronff and a heart sick at the
tyranny to whiph he was witness, had never so
stooped, but that a warm, eager, indefinite longing
w^as already on him to loosen by some means or other
those cruel fetters with which a man innocent of all
crime, save a mistaken cause and a quixotic loyalty,
w^as flung amongst thieves, bondsmen, and assassins.
When he had quitted the Bagne, and sat at even-
ing on his yacht-deck, seeing the smi go down in all
its golden glory in the Mediterranean waters, and
musing on the mass of misery and guilt where the
galley-slaves, when night closed in, would lie down
manacled and side by side, in worse beds than
kennelled dogs, the young man's thoughts revolved
incessantly and restlessly round a thousand vague,
wild, chivalrous, impossible plans for Valdor's rescue.
He could see no way to it that was feasible ; he could
devise no scheme, however rash and reckless, that it
was possible to obtain a chance to put in execution,
but his nature was sanguine, his heart was generous,
and he came of a bold race, who let nothing daunt
them or oj)pose them.
Strathmore,^in England, little dreamed the projects
that floated through his young nephew's mind, till
they settled into a matured and resolute will to libe-
rate the condemned man, if daring or skill could find
any means to do so, as he leaned over the side of his
vessel looking at the stone bastions of Toulon, where
they glared red in the ruddy sunset light. How,
232 STKATHMORE.
when, at what risk, and by what measures he could
not tell ; but to free the French noble was as resolved
in the youth's heart as though the Eumenides of
Greek fable had place and sovereignty in human life,
and had appointed him the chosen instrument by
which the evil which had been deliberately wrought
should recoil on the life that had begotten it.
When the sun had sunk and the stars had come
out, he still leaned there, looking down on the phos-
phorescent water, musing on this thing ; while in the
Bagne of Toulon the prisoner, lying in the cramped
misery which makes sleep torture, and denies even
the merciful oblivion of slumber, and the restoration
of lost joys which dreams may bring with them,
thought of Lucille gathered to her husband's heart,
thought of the vast and awful vengeance which was
his upon Strathmore if if he had but liberty !
And the yacht stayed off Toulon.
233
CHAPTER XIV.
THE SYMBOL OF THE DYING FLOWER.
Summer in the heart of the great city mockerj
of the name ! Summer ! with the incessant roll of
traffic, never ending from the dawn of one day to the
dawn of another; with the loud beating of steam-
presses throbbing and thundering through the nights ;
with the glory of the skies in azure warmth or starry
stillness, shut out from sight by the great wilderness
of roofs ; with the dense heat of the noon burning on
arid pavement, on whirling dust, on grey, gritty,
baiTen walls ; with the brightness of the sun shining
on toiling crowds, on panting horses, on thronged
narrow thoroughfares filled with noise, with stench,
with reeking heavy heat ; on dark, noisome courts,
where, when its rays steal in through some broken
chink or loosened shutter, they find men labouring
and lusting for gold, with their eyes blind to the day
and their souls lost to heaven. Summer ! with the
234 STRATHMORE.
only bird a prisoned lark in some garret window, that
shakes its dust-covered wings and strains its parched
throat in song that is but a long quiver of agony, while
its beak plunges into the dry sear sod as though in
some wild memory of the fresh woodland grasses far
away. Summer ! with the only flower a sickly drooped
plant, whose leaves hang lifeless, and whose blossoms
are colourless with smoke ; with the only living water
the ink-black, poisonous river, forest-thick with masts ;
with the only murmur through the day and night the
toiling of the weary feet of crowds who have forgotten
what green fields are like.
Summer ! it is a terrible and ghastly thing in the
pent alleys of a great city, and Marion Yavasour,
when she stood leaning her arms on the sill of her
narrow window, and gazing down into the noxious
street below, sickened at it as under a physical torture.
Beauty, colouring, poetry, luxury, they were the life
of this woman's life; her eyes longed, her heart
thirsted for them, as the lark's for the woodland
shadows, as the flower for the light of the sun and
the sweetness of the morning dew. Years of evil and
of infamy could not trample this out of her nature ;
she had been born for all the luxuriance of power, all
the delicate lustre of sight, and scent, and touch, and
ever-changing scenes, which are the prerogatives of
wealth ; she lived in tliem^ without them she perished
famine-stricken. The heat, the noise, the dusty glare,
the barren, vulgar hideousness of the life about her
were bitter tortm-e to her, the death to which she had
THE SYMBOL OF THE DYING FLOWER. 235
sunk in the whirling ocean had not been one tithe,
so accursed to her, as the hving death in which
she dwelt. Proud, she was steeped to the lips
in degradation ; a poetic voluptuary, her life was
sheared barren of every memory of beauty; once a
patrician and a ruler, she lived now a pariah im-
prisoned in want and misery. Vengeance could not
have been more subtle and complete.
Where she looked down into the hot, vile un-
sightly street, with its crowded wretchedness, and its
narrow strip of sunny sky left between the high pent
roofs as though in mockery of all the glorious world
beyond, laughing in loveliness and light, that was lost
and unknown to those who were dwellers here, her
thoughts wandered to her dead and golden past.
The hours of triumphs, the homage of courts, the
rich perfection of her peerless loveliness, the days of
her glad and splendid sovereignty, they floated before
her in memories tangled and lustrous like the glories
of a dream. A thousand summer days, a thousand
summer nights, the perfume of Southern climes, and
the fragrance of luminous seas flashing in phosphor
light, whilst the air was balmy with flowers, and filled
with music from palace-stairs, gleaming marble white
through deep odorous thickets of myrtle. The mur-
mur of love-words whispered low, and the radiance
of her own resistless beauty, with the gold light on
her hair, and the proud challenge in her eyes, and
the throngs of princes and of courtiers waiting on her
steps, that swept like Cleopatra's over rose-strewn
236 STKATHMOKE.
paths : they drifted past her, the phantoms of dead
years, and a dull, sickly sense of unreality stole on
her, looking on that glorious sun-lighted, diamond-
crowned vision of her youth.
Had hers ever been this fair and sovereign life?
Was slie what the world had known as Marion Vava-
sour ? The soft grace, the rich lustre, the divine fra-
grance of that bygone life, were they all dead for
ever ? Could the light never come back to her eyes,
the laughter to her heart, the beauty her loved, lost
beauty ! to her face, for which men had deemed the
world well lost ?
And the ceaseless ebb and flow of the black river-
tide, and of the surging throng in the weary glare
below, seemed to beat as answer on the stifling air,
" For ever, never ! Never, for ever !"
Yet among the living, as though condemned ghost-
like to wander without rest among the world that
knew her not, and in which she had no place, Marion
Vavasour was dead !
She gazed down into the colourless dust-strewn
street, while the air was filled with stifling odours
from which she shrank, and up from the river swept
pestilential vapours in the arid noon, in which the
pale leaves of the garret-flower drooped, and the
caged lark sat huddled and blind, with wings that
hung nerveless, and a little life without song. And,
as she gazed, through the weariness of her beggared
years, one human passion rose, still sweet, still un-
THE SYMBOL OF THE DYING FLOWER. 237
exhausted, still the right and the lust of the outcast
as of the monarch the passion of revenge.
The hatred which had destroyed her, was scarce so
cruel and so pitiless as the hatred that she bore ; for
men at their worst never reach the depths to which a
woman sinks when once unsexed, and cast into the
fathomless sea of unlicensed evil ; the tigress is more
cruel than her mate. Men strike at what they hate ;
women, more subtle and more merciless, strike at
what is best-beloved by the life they would destroy.
It is the difference of the sexes; one tramples out
under an iron heel, the other poisons unseen and with
a smile.
Yague, shapeless, hopeless, her vengeance rose
before her sight ; she knew now where to strike ^but
how ?
Sunk amongst the lowest, destitute, and banned
from every household, how could she sever two lives
lifted far above her in the security of rank, and power,
and peace ? How could she learn the force to forge
a bolt to reach and pierce the kingly mail of the
patrician and the statesman? She had seen where
the single weakness lay in the steel-clad strength of
the man who had denied her mercy ; but her hands
were empty, she had no weapon with which to strike.
All that brutality could have compassed, all that a
serpent subtlety and an insatiate thirst could have
schemed and been slaked in, she would have done ;
but her power was paralysed, whilst her passion to
destroy burned but the fiercer for its impotence.
238 STRATIIMOEE.
" He loves her ! he loves her ! " the words that had
been hissed from her lips in the night stillness as she
had looked on them, broke from them now, as though
in them she felt the whole measure of her hate were
gathered, as though in them lay the mystical incan-
tation at whose summons vengeance would rise incar-
nate, to be her minister and slave. She hated Lucille
as that which is evil ever hates what is pure ; the
compassion which had pitied her, the sweet gracious-
ness with which the young girl had smiled on her and
offered her her roses, were but memories which made
her savage greed the thirstier to destroy her.
She knew nothing of her save what rumour, float-
ing to her as rumour floats amongst the masses of
those above them, told ; that she was a young, high-
born girl, of whom many idle stories wandered down-
ward through the ranks of society, till even the lowest
caught and retailed them, touching her gentleness to
all who suffered or sought charity, and her husband's
devotion to her, rumour's hundred tongues outlying
one another in what they babbled of the beauty, the
luxury, the brilliance with which it was his pleasure
to surround her, and of the idolatry in which he
was said to hold one whom he had wedded when the
world had deemed him bound solely to power and
ambition.
This was all she knew; but it was more than
enough to overfill the measure of a deadly hate,
sole lingering passion of a ruined and ruthless life,
which, driven out itself from every fairer and every
THE SYMBOL OF THE DYING FLOWER. 239
holier thing, loathed and panted to destroy all beauty
that lived in another, all light that shone on other
liA'es.
Strathmore had been her slave; in his passion, in
his crime, she had been his temptress, even as she had
been his destroyer ; and a burning, poisonous jealousy
consumed her, twisted in with the lust for her ven-
geance. She hated him with a hate unutterable ; but
a thrill of thirsty envy ran through her when she
knew^ that this young and graceful loveliness was in
his home, in his heart, in his life.
If the vain and sensual nature of Marion Vavasour
had ever loved, she had loved for a brief wdiile the
man whose mad devotion had been lavished on her in
that imperious force which wakes the heart of women
in their own despite ; the cruel tyrant had valued
most the costliest toy she most utterly, most brutally
destroyed ; the sw^eetest, richest hours of her rich,
sweet past had been those in which Strathmore had
lain subject at her feet. She had believed that love
was for ever dead in him, and rightly; the feeling
which he bore to Lucille was too pure to bring the
passion he had knowai once, and once alone. But
this she did not know ; she only knew that in another
lay the joy of his life ; that to another was given his
kiss, his thoughts, his riches and his tenderness. And
the poison of a fierce and brutal jealousy was in her
the jealousy of a woman who hates, and who has
lost all that makes womanhood human.
" He loves her ! he loves her ! "
240 STEATHMOKE.
The thirsty words were on her lips as she leaned
out, looking on the heavy, sultry street ; in them
she seemed to feel the prophecy and surety of
her vengeance. Yet how touch those who dwelt as
far above her now as the skies were above the
wretched companions of her infamy? How, with
the impotent hate of an outcast, reach and sever the
lives surrounded with the might and the purple of
power ?
The serpent is powerless as the dove to harm,
unless it can wind its way in to wreathe around and
breathe its venom on the life it would destroy. She
had the will, the thirst, the passion to strike, and to
strike without pity ; but her hands were empty. It
was hopeless.
Where she leaned, the flower on the pent, dark
casement was blown by the wind against her lips ;
she shuddered from its touch ; she thought of the
rose rich, fragrant, dew-laden that she had di'awn
from its leafy nest of foliage on the terrace at Ver-
non^eaux. As that scarlet, odorous rose, had been
her life in the Past, like that withered, prisoned
flower in the closeness of the sunless, noxious garret,
was her life in the Present ! The poetry which still
lingered in this woman's nature made her lean over
the yellow faded leaves drooping there in the sicken-
ing air, and see in them companions to her fate, and
caress them with a weary hand the hand that once
dealt life or death at pleasure, and was touched with
as reverent a kiss of homage as that which queens
THE SYMBOL OF THE DYING FLOWER. 241
receive. Susceptible, impressionable still, a thrill of
terrible joy ran through her, as at some symbol and
metaphor of vengeance, sure, if slow, as she saw
gnawing at its roots the poisonous fungi they were
to her an omen and an augury.
"Ah!" she whispered to the flower, with the
gi'aceful, imaginative fancy which once had been her
softest charm, now warped, usurped, and darkened,
and made evil like herself, " they have shorn you of
beauty, of fragrance, of glory, of life. No sun shines
on you, and none think you fair. You are dead, and
the world will give you no place but you hold what
will poison still!"
" Was any one ever so happy as you make me ? "
Lucille asked him, with a sigh of joy, as she
leaned against him, in the lateness of that night,
looking upward at the stars, while there stretched
below the casement, the winding waters and the dark
woodlands of the home that had been her bridal gift.
She did not Jjnow why, for all answer, he pressed her
closer to his heart.
"Thank God!"
" And you !" she murmured, while her eyes looked
upward into his, " with all the gloiy and the great-
ness of your life, you never forgot Lucille."
" When I forget Lucille, my life will have
ceased!"
'His head was bowed over her, and his voice was
sunk to that deep tenderness which changed so utterly
VOL. in. R
242 STEATHMOEE.
the cliill languor of its habitual tone, and was never
heard save by her. She was an exquisite child to him
still, mth all her soft caprices, her poetic earnestness,
her fairy fancies that were law to him, her unsullied
innocence that was hallowed to him, and only became
tenfold the fairer, tenfold the fonder, to his sight and
to his heart through the changed ties which made her
young life one with his.
The keenest remorse sleeps often and long, as the
deadliest serpent lies dulled, and still, in peace through
many hours ; and in the happiness of Lucille almost
he found his own, for in her he saw his atonement
and his expiation.
She lifted her head with a fond caress: those
kisses of Lucille's lips seemed to purify his own;
remembering them, callous words had not seldom
been checked, a pitiless sneer not seldom been fore-
gone. He strove as far as his nature could to he
what she believed him.
" How beautiful the night is ! The day smiles on
us, but the night always seems fullest of God's love
and pity ? " she said, while her eyes gazed up to the
still starlit skies with that meditative love of nature
which beheld " God in all things," and found poems
in all, from the lowliest flower to the darkest storm.
He smiled tenderly on her; to comprehend this
was not possible to him ; in his youth he had never
known it, in his mature years it was yet farther from
him ; but in her it was sacred to him from disdain,
safe even from a jest.
THE SYMBOL OF THE DYING FLOWEE. 243
" You see beauty in all the world, Lucille ! If
these chill, lustreless nights of England are so lovely
to you, what will the Southern ones be the nights
of Baise, of Sicily, of Greece ? "
Where they leant against the balcony in the moon-
light, he spoke of all to which he would take her
some leisure time, when the pressure of office should
relax and leave him free; of hours on the Mediter-
ranean, where the lateen-boats were filled with fra-
grant freights of violets or olive-wood ; of luminous
waters, with the golden- orange fruit and purple
grapes hanging above the waves; of nights in the
Carnival time, when from some lofty casement she
would look out on the Roman throng and on the
dome of St. Peter's, studded and circled with light ;
of moonlit evenings, floating down the soft, grey Bos-
phorus, with each stroke of the oars leaving a trail
of phosphor gold, and the snows of Mount Olympus
towering in the lustrous radiance of the stars. Of
scenes and hours which he drew from the memories
of a long life, accomplished eloquence and facile words
supplying that poetic temper which, so vivid in her,
had never, even in youth, existed in him, so that its
absence could not strike coldly or harshly on her, as
she listened to the mellow music of his voice, and the
graphic painting of his words, and let her thoughts
float over the golden glories which steeped that rich
dreamland, her futm-e.
And in such hours as this letting memory drift
from him, and the fevered ambitions and bitter con-
k2
244 STEATHMOEE.
tests of his world be forgot, while his thoughts and his
words took their colour from hers Strathmore him-
self was almost happy. " Almost" for the great lost
soul of the man could never wholly cast aside the
burden of its sin ; and the light of his life, that
" light which never was on land or sea," had died for
ever for him when Marion Vavasour had betrayed
him, and Erroll had fallen by his hand.
245
CHAPTER XV.
QUiESTORES PARICIDII.
It was far past midnight in Westminster, and as
the Minister, whose sweeping and polished eloquence
withered like an ice-blast all it smote, passed out
from the House, after a great field-night, the ap-
proaches were hemmed in by a crowd breathless to
see and eager to welcome him. Successful, but
never popular; firm rooted in the confidence, but
holding no place in the love, of the nation ; won-
dered at, but scarce understood, in a country which
deifies the Common-place, and calls its best Man of
Business its best Statesman, the subtle and profound
intellect of Strathmore was little comprehended ; his
genius was state-craft, his aspiration absolute domi-
nance ; born to rule, to command, and hold an
undisputed sceptre, he was as little capable, at
heart, of sympathy with the English nation, as the
English nation with him. Solely beneath his sway,
246 STRATHMOEE.
they would have been ruled with the steel of a Sulla at
home, but they would have never been degraded and
ridiculed abroad. The hand of the tyrant might
have been iron, but it would have grasped a sword
never to be bribed into its sheath by an appeal to a
trader's instincts.
Thus, England had little comprehension of him,
and as little love; but the spirit of his policy was
essentially the spirit which ennobles the blood of a
country, and gives her the fear of her foes and the
faith of her allies ; and although this is the spirit
which of all others is most lacking in the politics of
the nation, and is deemed by her most costly and
"idealic," there are hours, now and then, when the
blood stagnant in her veins is roused by it, as the
war-horse which has long worn the girths of the
huckster's saddle, and borne the trader's pack, still
rouses to the trumpet-blast of the charge, and scents
the battle afar off with eao;er, restless memories of
glory gone.
This night had been one of them, and for once the
old grand temper was awake in the country, and it
recognised its exponent in the man, who, if his hand
were iron, would at least uphold with it the might of
England, and not put it behind him for the gold of
a shopkeeper's bribe, to be slipped into the closed
palm.
As he passed out into the night the crowds pressed
closer and closer, and cheered him to the echo : that
night in the autumn of the bygone year, when he had
QU^STOEES PAEICIDII. 247
given his life to the peril of the seas for the sheer
sake of those perishing in the storm, had bronght his
name home to the hearts of the people with a warm
human sympathy, which the aristocratic exclusivism
and the rapid brilliance of his career had banished,
rather than won. It had made his name loved by
thousands whose eyes had never rested on him, and
whose lives could render his no comprehension. It
was in the hearts of the people now, and they were
stirred as by one impulse; their shouts of welcome
echoed to the night, roused by something higher than
the trading interest, nobler than mere popular cla-
mour ; it was homage given, unbought and unbidden,
to that which was loftiest, truest, grandest in Strath-
more' s nature.
For the moment he was moved to something holier
than mere lust of power, to something warmer than
the mailed pride of ambition, as he bent his head to
the assembled multitudes; it was not the patrician
who acknowledged the acclamation of the populace,
it was the man who recognised the sympathy of his
brethren.
He sank back in the solitude of his carriage, with
a new and softened light within his eyes, and a weary
sigh of rest after conflict.
He had done evil, but he had done also good
good, he hoped, wide, lasting, wrought for his country
and for the sake of millions, who yet lay in the womb
of the future. Might not this suffice to wash out the
blood-stain on his life ?
248 STRATHMOEE.
Scattering the people clustered in the narrow ways,
the carnage moved forward in the clear light of the
summer moon. The cheers rose deafening on the
air ; the masses swayed and surged in the fitful sha-
dows; the great stone piles pealed back in echo the
name the multitude hurled in honour to the starlit
skies " Steathmore ! Strathmore ! "
As the waves of a sea part and roll back, so the
waves of human life swept aside with their mighty
murmur, and, as it had risen from the sea-depths,
with all its lost and evil beauty, known through all
the change of years and ravages of a dishonoured
life, so there rose to his sight, from the waving
crowds and flickering shades of night, the face of
Marion Vavasour. For a moment seen, and in a
moment lost. Yet in that moment they had looked
on one another, and an eternity could have told
neither more.
The new and better light died out from Strath-
more's eyes ; a great anguish tightened about
him; a dread, such as had seized him when he
had seen her face in the yellow autumn mists of
White Ladies, clenched upon his life, withering
all hope, all peace, all future unborn years. The
temptress and companion of his sin was that sin's
avenger.
" Atonement ! " The lurid cruel eyes of the woman
for whose beauty he had steeped his soul in guilt,
mocked at it, and drove him out from rest, as the
Furies drove Orestes, even when remorse had brought
QU^STORES PAEICIDII. 249
him weary, and worn, and sick unto death, to lie, if
but for one brief hour, at the foot of the altars
of God.
It was long past midnight.
His face was haggard, and his step had changed
from its firm and stately tread to one slow and weary,
as he passed through the halls and corridors of his
ministerial residence, through tlie glow of white
light, rich hues, delicate marbles, and clustering
foliage. He had come from a proud success, with
which Europe would teem on the morrow; he had
come from the homage of the peoples, rendered as by
one voice to him as the upholder of the honour of
their nation. Yet it was not as a victor that he
returned, and had the world beheld him in his soli-
tude, it would not have found one memory of its
triumph remaining with the man who, but a few
seconds before, had spoken in the name of England
the grand challenge which would uplift her ancient
fame in the sight of a listening world, and who now
came, as tlie guilty come into the presence of the in-
nocent, with the knowledge and the burden of a dead
sin alone with him, and upon him.
He passed through the silent chambers into Lucille^s,
where the aromatic silvery lamplight was soft and
shaded, burning low.
Early in the evening he had returned with her from
a state gathering, and had bidden her go to her rest ;
for used to the child-like simplicity and even tenor of
250 STEATHMOKE.
her years at Silver-rest, she was too young to be much
in the restless vortex of that great world, of which her
loveliness and his name had made her at once a queen
a queen as guileless and unconscious in her child-
sovereignty now, as when her crown was of the wood-
land violets, and her wealth of the ocean shells, by
the sea-shore at Silver-rest.
She had obeyed him ; she had no will save his, the
gentlest guide, the surest guardian her life could ever
have owned, since he had bent the iron of his nature
like a reed, and changed his very character, until all
its coldness, egotism, and ascetic indifference to all
which weaker men hold dear, were lost in tenderness
for her. Listening long for the echo of his step, she
had sunk to sleep, with words of prayer for him the
last upon her lips. He moved through the long space
of the chamber, and stood beside her couch, looking
on that rest to which the night brought no evil
memories, and whose dreams were pure and joyous
as the dreams of infancy.
Her bright hair fell unloosed about her, a flush was
on her cheeks, for the night was warm, her head
rested on her arm in all the grace of profound repose,
and that unconscious and dreaming youth smote
him tenfold with the bitterness of guilt as he stood
looking down upon her in the shaded silvery light ;
was his heart one on which it should be hushed, were
his lips those whose kiss should wake her from her
slumber ?
Once more in the shadows of the night the eyes of his
QUiESTORES PAEICIDII. 251
temptress and destroyer had looked on him, rising up
from the surge of the multitudes as she had risen from
the surge of the waves, forbidding him peace, claim-
ing him hers by right of their dead sin, by right of
their mutual guilt to the life which had been slaugh-
tered by the lie of the traitress, and by the hand of
the assassin. What place had he beside the rest of
innocence? It were juster that he were driven out
to dwell with the lost, and the accursed, in the shame
and the hatred of all things pure and sinless, of all
lives loved of God.
As though even in sleep conscious when he was
near, Lucille stirred, and awakened, with the light
in her fair eyes, and the smile upon her face with
which she had awakened from the sleep of child-
hood in her dead mother's bosom, and had looked up-
ward to the gaze of him whose crime had made her
desolate ere yet she knew her loss or felt her wrong.
Her low cry thrilled his heart with its waking wel-
come, the flush of a beautiful gladness deepened
the warmth of her cheeks, her arms w^ere thrown
about his neck, while her lips breathlessly whispered
sweet, eager questions for his honour, his triumphs,
his greatness, all dear to her, as the life to which, in
her sight, they gave the sanctity of the Patriot and the
grandeur of the Ruler.
The voice which answered her quivered slightly;
the lips which met her caress were cold; the face
which bent over her was dark and worn with the
memories which thronged about him in the hush of
252 STRATHMOEE.
night. T]ie colour died from her cheek, the light was
quenched in her eyes, the shadow of his own fate fell
upon her.
"You suffer? You are ill? What is it what
has grieved you? " she asked him, in the rapid dread,
the vague terror of any evil which menaced him.
He drew her closer to his heart, and the dissimula-
tion, the self-control which were alike his nature and
training, did not desert him now.
" Nothing, my own love. I have been speaking two
hours, and the debate has been a tempestuous and
lengthened one, till for once I am weary and fatigued ;
that is all."
She did not doubt him : that his lips would have
spoken other words save those of truth, she dreamed
no more than she dreamed of the blood-stain on his
life ; but the eyes which took all their joy from his
gazed wistfully upward to the face which, waking
from her slumber, she had seen, not for the first time
darkened and careworn, with the resurrection of a
guilty past, the futile yearning of a great remorse.
" All ? You are sure it is all ? " she asked him, wist-
fully. " You would not keep anything from me even
in love ? You would not withhold even a thought ?
You would let Lucille share your pain as she shares
your glory ? "
His heart sickened, his conscience shrank under
the tender words ; his eyes, fathomless and unrevealing
beneath every gaze and every torture, fell under the
questioning appeal of those uplifted to him in their
innocence, unconscious of the anguish that they dealt.
QUiESTOEES PAEICIDII. 253
Evil should not lia\'e been the salvation which had
saved her; guilt should not have been the secret
of the heart on which hers leaned ! A quick shudder
ran through his frame ; he drew her to him with pas-
sionate force.
" None would have loved you as I love ? None
could have been to you as I am, Lucille ? "
" Ah ! No, no. Why ask ? ^you know that so
well!"
And as she clung to him, her bright hair falling
over his arms, her eyes full of such liquid light as
painters give to the pure and happy eyes of angels,
she heard but in his words the tenderness of her hus-
band's love, and had no knowledge in them of the
sleepless dread of that remorse which strove to lull its
suffering, and to find peace where no peace was, with
the remembrance of her guiltless life, blessing and
blessed by him.
254
CHAPTER XVI.
THE OUTCAST BY THE GATES.
Light, and colouring, the coolness of water, the
shade of leafy depths, the fragrance of flowers, the
green belts of slopmg lawns, and the sparklmg
spray of fountam columns tossed aloft among the
brilliance of blossom and the lofty heads of trees,
all she thirsted for were here, where Marion Va-
vasour stood looking through the iron tracery of
gates, as the prisoner through his bars gazes at the
world to which he can never go forth again. They
were the lodge-gates to the grounds of the Thames
villa of S. A. R. le Due d'Etoiles, filled with the
choicest gathering of England at a brilliant fete, that
was simply called a garden party. Where she stood,
crouched down against the iron scroll-work, in the
dust of the highway, she could see the velvet slopes of
tiu'f, the pyramids of bloom, the glimpse of white
THE OUTCAST BY THE GATES. 255
distant terraces through the breaks of stately avenues
she could hear the swell of far-off music, even the
low murmur of a laugh when a group swept near
she could breathe in the rich fragrance of flowers and
of perfumes she could look, in one word, on the life
of her Past.
A few years since, and he who was host there had
led her through the salons of the Tuileries, bending
to her word in homage, seeking no emph'e so precious
as one smile from the lips that poets hymned, and the
eyes that recalled all the gloiy of Helen's. A few
years since, and she had been of them, with them,
omnipotent by right of every sovereign grace un-
rivalled, were it only by the light of that angelico riso
which played upon no other beauty as it played on
hers.
Now the Prince d'Etoiles would have passed her by
unknown ; and she stood without his gates among
the outcasts of the great highway, one with the roof-
less, nameless beggars, who, in the whirling dust and
summer scorch, crouched among the trampling hoofs
and crowded wheels to look with hungry, wondering
eyes through the bars at these stray glimpses of
the life, so unlike theirs, that their sight could not
grasp, nor their fancy realise it. Her hands were
clenched upon the bars, her brow was pressed on the
cold iron ; she saw the blent light and shadow, with
the sun-gleam on the lawns, and the glimpses of
blossom and of colour that glanced between the trees ;
she hungered for her life that was lost for ever ; she
256 STEATHMOEE.
stood an alien and an exile looking on the things that
knew her no more !
The white wand of a lacquey struck her on the
shoulder with a sharp reprimand; the same action,
the same words with which, in the years that were
gone, the chasseur of the Marchioness of Vavasour
and Vaux had used to the Bohemian Redempta.
There is a wild, wanton Nemesis at times in human
life. She started at the blow and the indignity ; for
the moment she forgot that she had no longer the
power to resent most bitter loss of this world's losses !
and turned with her old superb grace, with her old
proud patrician rebuke.
In the carriage, whose way she stopped, its occu-
pant leaned back among the cushions alone, bowing,
something haughtily and distantly, as the throng,
gathered about the gates, lifted their hats to salute
him. As she raised her head, she met his eyes ; he
knew her ; a quiver passed over his face ; he shrank
visibly, irrepressibly, as though a knife had struck
him ; and his carriage swept on through the ducal
gates, leaving her without in the dust and the throng
of the parched higliAvay.
A moment before, full of the projects, the contests,
the purposes, and the successes of power, of the atti-
tude of the session which hitherto been in all its
triumphs his own aiisteia, and of the far-stretching
foresight and matured calculations of the ambition
w^hich had been from his youth, and would be to his
death, his master-passion, Strathmore, at sight of her,
THE OUTCAST BY THE GATES. 257
forgot all save his past, its dead guilt leaving its weak-
ness in the life in all else strong its buried crime
claiming him slave, who in all else was ruler. Leader
and chief, master of men, and moulder of circum-
stance, he could not purchase or enforce oblivion
he could not choose but bow, conscience-stricken,
before the eyes of an outcast in the throng ! He
had loved her, he had sinned for her : she was in his
life for ever, its burden, its retribution, its destroyer.
All his past came back, with that one look from
the sleepless eyes of Marion Vavasour.
While he joined his own world, while he spoke the
courtly nothings of the day, while he chatted with
princes and with peers, and moved through the bril-
liant groups of the gardens, her memory was on him,
and the sense of a remembered crime, fresh as though
born of yesterday, upon his life.
A few lengths of leafy avenue, a few stretches of
sward, and he looked on the fairness of Lucille's
face, in its first and loveliest dawn of youth youth
without a shadow, without a fear, without a soil. The
centre of a group whose polished homage she still
heard with naif surprise, and still turned from with
graceful carelessness, she stood on the broad white
steps of a terrace, where a thousand blossoms encircled
her in their luxuriant colours, like a young Angel of
the Flowers. Against her leant a handsome boy, a
little heir of the house, who looked up at her with
loving eyes, while she smiled down upon his beauty
and wound a wreath of half-opened lilies among
VOL. III. s
258 STRATHMOKE.
his golden locks, as mucli a cliild as he, as joyous
and as innocent. She was a picture, soft as a
poet's dream, in the haze of earliest summer; yet
he looked on it with a shudder : he saw it through
the darkness of his past. A brief while, and he knew
that she would smile thus upon the laughing eyes,
and toy thus with the sunny hair, of a child born to
his race, and bearer of his name, and he from whom
her child would take existence, had been the destroyer
of her father !
Thus ever his own sin recoiled and struck him, in
his gentlest thoughts, his purest hours.
Strathmore, to whom fear was unknown, and in
whom the common weaknesses of men had no
place, dreaded with untold horror to see the eyes of
Marion Vavasour fasten on Lucille; he felt as
though the very air must tell his secret when she
passed the woman whose lie had made him slay the
man whom he had loved.
In his vengeance he had bidden her go forth to the
fate that waited her ; to live as they live, who trade
in beauty, to die as they die, craving a crust. His
bidding had been obeyed, the condemnation to which
he had sent her out had become hers to the utter-
most of its law; and now the Outcast he had
made, was in his path, stronger than his strength,
more powerful in her abject wretchedness than he
in his haughty eminence, an Ate that dogged his
steps, and rose, haunting and abhorred, between
him and the light of the summer sun, between
him and the holiness of innocence. Where he
THE OUTCAST BY THE GATES. 259
stood, with a calm smile on his lips, wdth serene and
mtty words at his command, flattered, honoured,
sought, a courtier, a statesman, no ambition beyond
his grasp, no rank but what could be his at his will,
his thoughts were filled with restless, fugitive schemes
to banish from his sight, and thrust out of his world,
that nameless beggar at the gates !
A homeless wanderer was more powerful than he ;
he had had his vengeance, whose sweetness he had
once said could never escape him, but its fruit was
his also, and of whatever it brought forth must he
eat.
An hour later and his carriage swept with swift and
silent roll over the turf, and under the pleasant shadow
of the trees, in the warmth of the setting sun. Lucille
lay back beside him, her bright, rapid words broken
with sweet melody of happy laughter, her face turned
to him, radiant with the gay softness of her father's
smile, while she told him a thousand brilliant, airy
trifles of the world that was so new to her, and
of which she saw but one phase, full of graceful
beauty, and harmonious as music to her. And he
heard her while his thoughts were heavy Avith deadly
memories, he looked on her uplifted eyes while
his own restlessly sought the face of the woman to
whom he was for ever bound by the indissoluble
bondage of a mutual crime. He dreaded the gaze
of his traitress, as he had never dreaded the close
presence of death when the waves beat him down, and
the cold, curled mass of the reared waters buried him
s2
260 STEATHMOEE.
beneath them he dreaded for it to fall on the one
beside him, as men dread the breath of a pestilence to
pass over what they love.
The carriage swept on throngh the green avenues
and the sunlit freshness of the park, along the side of
glancing water, and with the low gladness of mirth
on his ear. Suddenly Lucille's voice dropped, her
laugh was hushed, over her face stole the earnest
sadness of a deep compassion ; she leaned nearer to
him, and her hand stole into his.
" Look there ! That is the woman to whom I gave
my roses. How weary, how wretched, how lost she
looks ! Could we do nothing for her ? "
And he heard the pitying words spoken of her
father's murderess ! he saw her eyes fill with a
divine tenderness for the woman whom he had loved
with a madman's passion, and sent out to a vengeance
great as her guilt and his own !
By a ghastly fascmation his glance followed hers
into the throng about the gates through which they
passed, and he saw, fastened on Lucille's face, a look
like the chained and baffled panther's, thirsting for
her prey; a look that sent through all his veins
an icy shiver.
Lucille turned pale, and her large soft eyes, which
rested on the outcast mth such mournful pity, filled
with a startled fear like those of a young fawn, as
she leant farther back in the barouche, and her hand
unconsciously closed nearer on his.
" How strangely she looks ! She frightens me !"
THE OUTCAST BY THE GATES. 261
For liis life, for her life, he could not have answered
her, while upon them was the gaze of Marion Vava-
sour quoting the past, claiming the future, by right
of that mutual, unexpiated crime which had destroyed
the guiltless. His face grew white, his courage
shrank from Lucille's exclamation, he shuddered
beneath the clinging touch of her hand; and the
woman who watched them saw that even now the
first hour of her vengeance had come, that even now
she had pierced through the single weakness of his
mailed strength, and forced him to remember,
A moment more, and the carriage swept on through
the light and shade, leaving the homeless wanderer in
the throng ; and he saw but his own memory of the
woman he had worshipped, of the woman who had
betrayed him, with the diamonds crowning the gold
wealth of her hair, and the lustrous, languid light in
her antelope eyes, as she had been in the glory of her
youth, in the sovereignty of her beauty, on the night
when, at her tempting, he bowed and fell, knowing
nothing save the sweetness of her kiss !
Lucille looked upward at him with anxious wist-
fulness.
" Are you in pain ? Are you ill ? "
Life could not have held for him a more bitter pang
than lay in her question !
But he was long used to wear the impenetrable
armour of an unmoved serenity, and live beside a
guiltless life without a sign of self-betrayal. His
voice had its accustomed calm as he answered her.
2Q2 STEATHMORE.
and his eyes met hers with their okl tenderness, if
in them there was a deeper and more weary melan-
choly.
" No, my dear one, it is nothing save the heat, per-
haps, and I am somew^hat tired. But, Lucille, do
not look at those unhappy outcasts again ; you cannot
help them; the vastest wealth could not avail to
succour all the wretchedness of a great city ; it only
agitates you, and is injurious for you, my darling, and,
as such, pains me."
Those who had best known his past, could not liave
heard in his words or in his voice the betrayal of any-
thing save solicitude for her ; still less could she have
done so.
She looked upward at him mth a smile that was
earnest and almost mournful.
" I will not, if I can help it ; but when I see any
who look so hopeless as that, I wonder why life is
so beautiful for me and is so stricken for them ! Why
is there so much misery ? All would love God, and
do good, I think, if they were happy ? "
" A beautiful and simple code of ethics, my child !
if you could give the world your innocence and
your faith, it might be true."
" But is it not true ? " pleaded Lucille, while her
thoughts travelled wistfully over the mysteries of evil
and of pain which were vague and strange to her
dawning life, which had been one long, cloudless day,
under one guardian care since her birth. "Love is
born of gentleness, and gentleness, I think, would win
THE OUTCAST BY THE GATES. 263
the harshest and the most lost to sometJdng better.
Perhaps if even that woman we saw just now had
been shown mercy when she first suffered, she
might not be so utterly callous as she looks ? How
strangely her eyes fastened on me, did you see ?
Why was it?"
How could she know that every one of her words
was worse than a dao^ger in his heart ?
"Why, my love?" repeated Strathmore, wearily.
" Why ? Because those who are lost and evil, hate
all that is guileless and pure ! Because her hfe is
guilty, and yours is sinless ! "
As the night follows the day, Marion Vavasour
followed the lives she hated. Havino; once seen that
her sight and her presence had power to pierce him
to the quick, she never released him from it ; wherever
one of the people could follow a man of rank and
emmence, she followed him ; secretly, so that no
other noted her, but surely and constantly, until that
vigil, veiled but unceasing, grew intolerable to him,
with that torture which he had dealt out to her, when,
before the stroke of his vengeance fell in the sight
of assembled Paris, go where she would his eyes were
upon her, seek escape as she might his silent presence
was ever near, mutely quoting to her the Past, mutely
menacing the Future.
When he left the Lower House, or drove out of
Downing-street, he saw her; when he passed from
State ceremonies he met her eyes, where she stood
264 STRATHMOEE.
amidst the crowds which thronged "the approaches of
the palace, and were trodden by horses' hoofs, and
driven asunder by the whips of lacqueys. Leaving
the fond words and lingering farewell of Lucille in
the brightness of morning, there, near his gates, in
the sunlight, would be the form of the woman whom
his vengeance had driven out among the lost, nameless,
hopeless multitude. Going from the closeness of con-
tests, from the struggle of parties, from the question
of peace or war, w^eary with the heated pressure of
lengthened debate, or the success of a hard-won
victory^ his pride was stricken, his victory was em-
bittered, his strength beaten down, his greatness made
miserable and worthless in his sight, by the guilt
that was brought back upon his memory as he saw
the face of his temptress in the midnight gloom, or
in the greyness of the breaking dawn.
Her presence almost felt rather than actually
seen grew intolerable to him ; the sight of that
haggard face, with its thirsty eyes and its wreck
of womanhood, its fearful relics of grace and of
beauty, lingering there as though in hideous mockery
of what she once had been, became feared by him to
whom fear was unknown, wdth a nervous and un-
conquerable dread. He strove to bury his past, to
live it down, to wash it out wdth the assoiling of atone-
ment, to steep it to oblivion in the fair life that he
cherished and guarded, and force it into silence
under the grandeur of a dazzling and ambitious
THE OUTCAST BY THE GATES. 265
career, and Marion Vavasour was for ever before
him, the haunting wraith of those dead years, the
avenger, as she had been the temptress, of his
crime.
He could not free himself from her ; he was power-
less here. Wealth, station, command, were impotent
to force out of his path the woman who dogged it ;
eminence and authority were of no avail to put away
from him the pursuant presence of an outcast. Life
was hers as it was his, and where she came was
common to the poorest as to the proudest, the broad
and crowded highway of the world. True, he could
have given her into arrest as a vagrant, but that he
dared not do ; he knew the menace that spoke in her
eyes, he knew that from her lips enough might be
told of the past that bound them, and of that hour
in the solitude of the sea-storm, when his hand had
loosed her to the grave, to crush and break for ever
with its horror Lucille' s love and life.
She knew not the vengeance which she held thus
unconscious in her hands, but he knew it ; and it
chained him from every act which might have other-
wise released him from the woman who, under the
scourge and agony of his denial, had prophesied
tlie hour when he should ask in vain of earth or
heaven the mercy he had refused. Now and again
wild, dark, baseless thoughts drifted through Strath-
more's mind, for his nature could not wholly
change ; but they were each perforce abandoned.
266 STRATHMORE.
each fraught mth too close danger of waking the very
evil that he feared. The sense of weakness and of
ch'ead tightened upon him, worst tyranny of all to the
man to whom feebleness and fear were craven things,
unknown and unpitied ; a baffled impotent hopeless-
ness began to gnaw into his life as it had done when
he had first learned that Valdor had unearthed his
secret ; a sense of despair grew on him ; atonement
was a madman's dream, since guilt was deathless
thus !
He dreaded, moreover, lest Lucille should note the
constant vigil of the woman to whom she had given
her roses ; lest she should question him of it in her
ignorance, whilst he, powerful in wealth, in rank, in
command, would be powerless to drive ou.t from her
the presence, and ward from her the gaze of the one
in whom she saw but a beggared wanderer of the
People. When he was not with her, he sought with
almost morbid solicitude that she should never be
alone. His own days, claimed and absorbed by public
life, he provided that all her hours should be so filled
with a succession of pleasures, entertainments, and
companionship, that in his absence no space should
be left for her to spend in solitude, that she should
never observe how closely the outcast to whom she
had tendered her flowers watched her when she drove
from her own gates.
For Marion Vavasour, in the strange caprice of a
hopeless hatred, which grew the more bitter because
each day as it rolled by brought her but a more
THE OUTCAST BY THE GATES. 267
vivid sense of its own utter impotence for vengeance,
never wearied in following the young girl wliom
she longed to destroy not less than to destroy him.
Day after day, night after night, she spent the
long hours watching and waiting for one glimpse of
Lucille.
Under the park trees, where those more homeless
and more wretched yet than she, had slept through
the summer nights, and lay in the dry long grass in
the sun, staring blankly at the delicate glittering
throng of the life with which they had nothing in
common, scarcely their humanity, she saw her
sweep by tln"ough the light, whilst men checked their
horses, and the crowd without the rails tmiied to gaze
after a loveliness that touched all those who looked on
it, who bore it away, rather in their hearts than in their
thoughts, as men who have looked on a face of Titian,
or a dream of Delaroche, bear its memory away into
the heat and noise of the busy streets and the avarice
and struggles of their narrow lives, and are the l^etter
for it, though they scarce know why. In the stillness
of a Sunday noon she would steal down and hide
amongst the hanging foliage, where she had been
given alms from Strathmore's wealth, and watch,
from the distance, where Lucille wandered among the
aisles of her rose-gardens, or rested near him where
he sat, as they believed unseen, under the shadow of
cedars or acacias, whilst he listened to her words
with the smile upon his lips that was for the mo-
ment at least a smile of peace and happiness. In the
268 STRATHMOEE.
heat of a summer clay, while the pavement was white
with the driving dust, and her temples throbbed with
a dizzy pain under the incessant thunder of the
street traffic, she heard the long shout roll down the
ranks "for the Lady Cecil Strathmore's carriage,"
and saw her passing from concert, or dejeuner, or
drawing-room, as her outriders made way for the
stately equipage, while the woman to whom power,
and luxury, and homage had been the very core of her
life, envied these, the outward symbols and privileges
of rank and wealth, more hungrily than worthier and
fairer things. In the depth of midnight or in the
breaking dawn, one amongst the ever-toiling crowds
whose feet know no rest, and whose ebb and flow are
like the unceasing roar and murmur of a sea, she
saw her, beside Strathmore, passing from some palace
dinner or court ball, the bearer of his name, the
sharer of his honours, while she herself stood there,
in the gas-glare and the hurrying throng, alone in the
vast inhospitable city, with no life waiting her, no
companionship, no shelter, but those she shrank from
and abhorred ; since the haughty patrician, the proud
aristocrat, the delicate, refined, poetic epicm-ean, still
lived in Marion Vavasour's nature, and could not
perish until death itself.
Thus day after day, night after night a fero-
cious, poisonous hate grew up, and strengthened in
her, for the young life that was made one wdth his ;
strengthened the more, because powerless to injure ;
and he knew^ it, yet he could not thrust her from
THE OUTCAST BY THE GATES. 269
his patli he could not force her from the earth
in wliich she had common right to dwell. The tide
of human life was beyond his control, and had swept
them together even whilst furthest sundered by
every social barrier. She lived, and in her lived
also his buried crime; here the proud statesman
had no power, the negligent man of the world no
shield, the polished courtier no armour, tlie "iron
hand under the silken glove " no weapon ; he knew
his sin, and lived in feverish, broken, shapeless ex-
pectation, lest its retribution should rise, and pass
over him, to smite the life that was sheltered in his
bosom.
" I see that woman so often that w^oman to whom
I gave my roses ! " said Lucille, wonderingly, once,
while with a gesture that was almost fear she shrank
closer to him as their carriage drove from the French
Embassy through the midnight streets.
" You allowed her alms, my love ; it is sufficient to
make her follow you. Notice her no more."
He kept his voice calm and indifferent, and the
reply w^as given without hesitance, seemingly without
effort; but instinctively, unconsciously, where she
leaned against him in the darkness of the night, he
drew her closer to his heart, as though she were me-
naced by some near and physical peril.
As his eyes had met those of Marion Vavasour, in
the flickering light of the lamps, while his carriage
had flashed past the place where she stood, and her
gaze had travelled from him to rest on the face of
270 STEATHMOEE.
Lucille, to the memory of both had returned the
words that Redempta the Zingara had spoken, long
years before, when they who had become each other's
curse first met under the summer stars, by the Bohe-
mian waters :
" There shall be love ; and of the love, sin ; and of
the sin, crime ; and of the crime, a curse ; and the
curse shall pursue and destroy the innocent."
The curse already had destroyed lives that were
guiltless : was yet another still demanded ?
271
CHAPTEE XVII.
THALASSIS! THALASSIS!
It was on the close of a burning day in the hot
Midi ; a day of intolerable glare, of destroying cbought,
of parched, stifling, cholera-laden noxiousness under
those brazen skies, within those relentless walls of the
Toulon Bagne. The horrible heat had made even
the gardes-chiourmes heavy and listless, and they had
suffered a few of the forcatSj unchidden, to drop
down, gaspmg and powerless, like panting hounds;
nature wears itself out, and humanity is remembered
now and then, even in a convict prison.
At one part, of the fortifications a brace of galley-
slaves was worldng, a little asunder from the rest, on
a sandy level facing the sea, with a single over-
seer near them; brandy, and the heat, and the
sand glitter, made the garde sleepy and inattentive ;
while heavy bribes from a young Englishman,
who had of late been much about the Bagne, had
272 STRATHMOEE.
something, yet -mote than the sultry air, and the
fumes of the petits verves, to do with his unusual
lack of vigilance and the separate post of labour
he had given to the political deportes, on that stretch
of sand excavations lying in front of the stirless
summer sea. They were kept late at labour there,
for the new stone curtain and redoubts that were
to be erected at that point were pressing, and the
government had directed that no time should be
lost, but that separate parties of the gaUrieyis should
be told off, to continue the works night and day until
they were completed.
The formats were of less value than the brutes
whose toil they bore, and to whose labour they were
harnessed ; it mattered nothing how many hundred
of them might wear out, drop down, and perish in
that giant travail if they died by droves so much
the better, there were the less expenses for the
exchequer.
The hot day faded, the twilight fell lightly, rapidly,
without stars, for the skies were black and stormy.
The garde-cMourme lit his lantern, the prisoners toiled
on, with spade and pickaxe, deep down in the sand
and gravel, with their backs bowed and their limbs
weighted with irons, and their breath like blown and
worn-out horses in that unnatural and herculean
toil to which their lives had no habit, their limbs had
no use ; while scattered all along the sand level were
the chains of convicts, with the crack of the overseers'
THALASSIS ! THALASSIS ! 273
whips sounding on the silence, and the ghtter of the
lanterns shining down the line in the descending
twilight that would soon be night.
And beyond, on the water, the yacht lay at anchor,
with a blue light, that she had hung out for many
nights past, burning at the mast-head, to prevent, as
it w^as understood, her being run down in the dark-
ness by the chasse-mar^es and other vessels that came
to or past the port of Toulon, trading from Italy and
the East.
The gmxle-cJiiourme, with grumbling imprecations,
turned to re -light his lantern that had gone out,
setting it down on a block of granite while he adjusted
its wick, growling coarse Bas-Rhin oaths at his pri-
soners for not doing their work quicker ; it was a
signal, though no word had ever passed between him
and them ; a slight risk made worth his while to bear
by Lionel Caryll's rouleaux of gold pieces, with which
he could pm'chase his escape from his hateful post,
and buy the little strip of land in Alsace, which ever
since his boyhood he had vainly coveted. His back
was turned ; with a wrench the deportes tore asunder
the irons which had been all but filed through, and
only hung together by a link, sprang up out of the pit
in which they worked, and fled, fleet as hill-deer, over
the sandy surface in the grey of the falling night,
their footfall noiseless on the loose and yielding earth.
Busy with his lantern, he did not, or seemed not to,
hear their stealthy and sudden flight. When he turned
VOL. III. T
274 STEATHMOKE.
the full blaze of liis light on the gravel-pit, and, look-
ing down, found the yawning hole untenanted, and
raised the hue-and-cry, the condamnes had had three
minutes' start a priceless treasure in that race for
liberty and life.
The alarm was given. Force, brutal and omnipo-
tent, was out like a sleuth-hound after those who
sought that most begrudged and costly thing on earth
their Freedom.
The bastions swarmed with soldiery; the gardes-
chiourmes poured out with hunters' fury, petty tyrants
who had lost their slaves; the shots rang on the
still night, all Toulon was astir; two forgats had
escaped, two men out of whom all sense and sin of
that daring vice of Liberty should have been crushed
and drilled in the granite walls and under the iron
chains of the life that had lowered them to beasts,
and robbed them even of their Names. The Bagne
was in tumult, the hell-hounds tore out on the
search over the wide sand level stretching to the sea,
the bullets hissed through the air, the gendarmes
hurled themselves, armed to the teeth, on the track
of the fugitives. Inside the Bagne they would have
been recaptured at once ; outside the walls there was
one chance, for that one chance was the Sea.
The Sea! incarnate liberty itself, that held out
freedom to the bondsmen. The shots seethed past
them and fell round them, scattering the sand in their
eyes and ploughing the gi'ound at their feet, their
THALASSIS ! THALASSIS ! 275
ankles plunged into tlie loose soil, the yells, and shouts,
and curses of the alarm were borne to their ears on
the wind, their limbs were dragged down by links of
the hanging chains, their strength was impoverished
by toil and misery, a fate worse than death was close
on them, with every second that brought their pur-
suers nearer and nearer ere they could reach the grey
line of the gleaming water, longed for, panted for, so
near and yet so far ! Across the line of sand, yellow
and level in the fitful shadows, with the severed
fetters clanging like the trailing irons of escaping
slaves, with the press of the close pursuit hunting
them down, with the sound of the seas and the roar
of the following multitude, the crash of the gen-
darmes' tread, and the hiss of the plunging shot
deafening their ear and giddying their brain, with
life and liberty beyond, and behind a doom more
dread than death, they fled on through the heavy,
breathless night.
They reached the water edge; the loose, fresh-
raised sand embankment overhung the sea by some
eight feet, the waves surging and churning below
under the lash of the rising mistral. With that might,
which desperation alone can lend, they cleared it with
a bound of agony, and fell with a low, sullen splash
and plunge into the dark waters.
A volley, fired by those in pursuit, thundered down
the shore ; the balls hissed and shrieked as they cut
the water, while the oaths of gardes and gendarmes
T 2
276 STEATHMOKE.
yelled furious upon tlie air. One, as he rose to the
surface, was shot through the back; with a scream
that echoed over the sea, he bounded out of the water
in the reddened light, then sank never to rise again.
The other dived, and the storm of balls passed harm-
lessly above him ; ere he had leaped, he had torn off
with such convulsive strength as is born of a supreme
despair, the irons still clinging to his foot. He had
no weight on him ; he was a fearless swimmer ; and
there, at the mast-head, burned the signal-light, that
to him, and for him, meant aid, succour, welcome,
liberty, and all the breadth and freedom of the world.
He kept under water, only rising i^arely to the sur-
face, and then so cautiously, that in the shadowy
sultry evening he was unseen.* Those on the shore
had seen both sink when the volley had been fired ;
they supposed both had been shot down when the
death-shriek had rung over the sea. It was of little
moment ; both were dead instead of both dtportes.
The sea was alive for a while with boats, and
lanterns, and men groping with grappling hooks and
fishini:-nets for the drowned bodies; while torches
flung their ruddy glare over the white foam and black,
angry waters, and he who lay under the waves, amidst
the tumult and the flickering glare above him, knew
with every sound that passed, with every breath,
* In case any resemblance may be traced between the escapes of
Valdor and of Jean Valjean, I may observe that the above chapter
was written before I read the " Miserables," or knew that there was
such an episode in the work.
THALASSIS! THALASSIS! 277
for wliicli he stole upward to the air in stealth and
suffocation the bitterness of death.
Then as though nature herself lent succour from
the brutality of man to man, which outruns all the
rage of desert birds, all the ferocity of forest beasts
the gathered clouds broke with a tempest of rain,
driving, drenching, beating down the flames of the
torches, and casting darkness over all the sea. The
pursuit ceased, the search was given over ; the dead
bodies of two forgats I what were they but carrion %
At last at last he was alone in the sheltering water,
and this darkness that to him was more blessed than
ever is the sweetest light of summer moon, or gleam
of bridal starlight. He rose, and through the dense-
ness of the gloom and the ink-black sheet of falling
rain, he saw, beaming star-like, the little azure light.
Liberty, life, all the lost glories of his strength, all
the robbed vigour of his manhood, swept back with a
rush all through his frame. Even in that instant of
mortal danger and physical misery, once more he had
hope, and he had freedom ; they are the twin angels
of men's lives.
He sw^am out to the bright blue starry light swam
with that strength which comes in the extreme hours
of our fate, making us " rend the cords even as green
withes."
A few brief seconds more, and he stood on the
deck ; Lionel Caryll had saved him.
"Free thank God!"
278 STEATHMOEE.
The words broke from both their lips as the wild
rain-storm lashed round them ; then, without sign or
show of life, he fell down at the feet of the English
youth, the blood gushing from his mouth and nostrils
his senses blind and gone.
Before the sun rose, the yacht was far on her way
down the Mediterranean waters ; Yaldor was free.
Thus strangely does Circumstance turn avenger in
this life.
279
CHAPTER XVni.
UNDER THE WINGS OF THE ANGEL.
It was autumn at White Ladies.
The dying leaves were once more drifting on the
wind; the sun set in stormy purpled skies and tawny
pomp of tempest light : the seas ran high, and hurled
their white foam-crested waves upon the sands : it
was the fall of the year, rich, grand, profoundly
mournful, with here and there its summer hours few
and fleeting, eagerly treasured, early lost, like the
last lingering smiles on dying lips, in voiceless and
eternal farewell to all that they have loved and
blessed.
It was autumn, and evening ; and Strathmore stood
on the rose-terrace of White Ladies, while the linger-
ing rays of the sun that had set poured a golden lustre
over the crimson foliage, the brown rolling woods,
and the river, yellow mth the dead leaves of the water-
lilies. The fever of an unutterable inquietude was on
280 STRATHMORE.
him the fever of conscience, which knoAvs no rest.
He had left behind, in the rushing crowds and peopled
streets of the great city, the face which had pursued
him like a recurrent and inevitable fate ; but she was
in his life, she was in his thoughts, she poisoned all
his peace, she accused him in memory of that past
that he had sought to crush into oblivion. She had
risen out of the suro;e of the vast throncrs as she had
risen from the waves ; she had returned into his life,
she who had cursed it. He did not know what he
feared, yet he feared everything he I who had not
known what fear was. Even the idolised life of
Lucille had grown torture to him he dreaded lest
his unrest should lend its alarm to her, lest in his
sleep dreaming words should betray him, lest in his
eyes she should read the secret he veiled. Never yet
was there crime which did not sooner or later know
this doom !
He stood now looking over the sweep of forest,
park, and sea that lay before him in the ruddy fading
light. Power, honour, beauty of possessions, riches
of heritage, the greatness which ennobles life, the love
which softens and endears it these were all his, and
all were darkened, cankered, turned to misery and
dread, by the shadow of one dead sin. All that was
fair in his sight was poisoned by the past; all that
was sacred for him was imperilled by his guilt ; all that
was dearest to him would be destroyed for ever, if one
voice arose to whisper the knowledge his heart held.
His eyes filled with yearning and with pain as he
UNDER THE WINGS OF THE ANGEL. 281
gazed at the west, where the sun had sunk beyond
the sea. He thought of Erroll.
" He is aveno-ed he is aveno'ed ! " he murmured,
where he stood in the silence of the falling evening,
" more utterly than if I had died upon a scaffold, as
other murderers die ! "
Yes for the pang of the scaffold is but a moment,
and Strathmore's chastisement was lifelong.
Like a promise of redemption, she whom the
dead had bequeathed him looked upward in his eyes
in the last lingering sunlight, as her hand stole into
his.
" Why have you left me ? We are alone for a day
at the least, and when alone you are wholly my own!"
He shrank from the caressing words : " wholly
hers ! " while the darkness of the past claimed him,
drawing him ever and ever down out of the innocence
and light of her presence into its pestilential memo-
ries !
He pressed her to him with a passionate instinct, a
feverish tenderness, born of a terrible and nameless
prevision.
" Lucille ! Lucille ! I have never given you an
hour's pain never denied you a single wish ? I have
made you happy ? My love is sufficient for you, and
you want no other ? "
He spoke as he had spoken when she had wakened
from her sleep, in vague, opp^jpssive misery, in rest-
less, irresistible longing to be told, again and again
282 STEATHMOKE.
from her own lips, that through her the atonement of
his sin was made. Oh, madman ! who thought that
atonement lay in the happiness of another life, instead
of in the purification from passion, the renunciation
of evil, of his oa\^i !
She looked up at him with wondering pain, and
on her face was the look of an unspeakable love
a love beyond her childhood's faith, beyond her
joyous youth; spiritualised, exhaustless, "faithful
unto death," mournful even in its intensity, as though
the tragedy from whence it sprang unconsciously
shadowed it, and made it less the offspring of joy than
the angel of consolation.
" Oh, my lord my love ! " she said, softly and
passionately, while the tears rose up and stood in the
eyes where, to him, there ever seemed to lie the sad-
ness of her father's fate and of her young mother's
piteous doom. " Have you need to ask me that ? He
whom you loved, knows how Lucille loves you. My
life has no thought, no wish, no memory, but what
are yours, for is not my life you ? "
He pressed her in a close embrace, that she might
not see how his eyes filled and his face paled at the
reverence and the sweetness of those tender words ;
she loved him thus, and of that very love would be
her death-blow, if ever from her father's distant grave
the truth should arise and be revealed.
A letter she had lain dow^n on the marble gleamed
white against the dajfk and crimson leaves of the
UNDEE THE WINGS OF THE ANGEL. 283
autumn roses ; tlie superscription lay uppermost ; as
his orlance, mechanically and without note of it, fell
on the writing, he started with a shudder that she felt
through all her frame as his arms were wound about her.
He loosened her from him, and seized it all the
golden and purple glories of the sunset reeled before
his sight. The writing was that of the man who held
his fate of the hand that he had thought to weigh
and fasten down, paralysed for ever, beneath the irons
of the Toulon galley-slave.
" That letter ! That letter ! "
The words died on his lips faint and ill formed ;
even from her in that moment he could not wholly
hide the terror that fell on him, passing all cowards'
fear of death.
She looked upward, with the swiftness of affection,
to notice any shade of pain.
" Why ? What is it ? Nothing that grieves you ?
It came just now ; I took it from them, and brought
it to you."
" Quite right!" In that instant he had recovered
self-command, and his voice was measured and gentle.
" It gave me pain at the moment, my love, for for
it is the writing of one whom I believed worse than
dead. Leave me alone to read it. See ! there are
your fawns waiting for you. Go, and give them their
roses"
She looked at him a moment with wistful uncer-
tainty ; his voice was tranquil now, and he smiled on
284 STEATHMOEE.
her, yet she could not forget that shudder which she
had felt convulse him as she had been gathered in
his arms.
" Go, my darling," he said, with a smile a smile
while his hand closed on the letter of the man whom
he had thought silenced, as by the silence of the
grave ! " Go ; I would be alone a few moments."
She looked at him again, wistfully still ; then went,
for his wish was her law went with the grace and
swiftness of youth, for she had still a child's pure
pleasures, her hands filled with autumn roses, her
hair glancing in the sunlight, while the young deer
trooped to meet her with the delicate chimes of their
bells.
And he stood there with the opened letter in his
hand, and the prescience of calamity, which had been
upon him since he had first seen the face of Marlon
Vavasour in the summer midnight, become palpable,
and fronting him with the work of his own hand.
The crimson from the west shone full upon the page,
and the words seemed to reel in a scarlet haze before
him as he read :
" Strathmore, I am free, and in England. You
may have learnt, ere now, that your noble nephew
gave me liberty, and regained me more than life. I
shall await you to-night on the shore by the mo-
nastery church ; you will come as soon as the night
has fallen.
"Yaldor."
UNDEK THE WINGS OF THE ANGEL. 285
He who had been so deeply wronged, wrote with
the command of a monarch he who had wronged,
stood with the letter crushed in his hand, without
sense, sight, movement ; all his life blasted in him.
The blow fell unsoftened, unprepared ; the letters
by which Lionel Oaryll, bound to silence for a while,
had at last, from the East, sent the tidings of his
rescue of the condemned, had not as yet reached
him. The words he read were like the delirium of a
dream ; the force which had unlocked the prisoner's
chains and set him free, seemed unreal, unnatural, as
power that should have burst the bonds of death and
given resurrection from the grave. This was all he
knew: that he who had the secret of his life had
risen from a bondage, certain as the tomb, and held
a vengeance vast as his own ^\Tong !
As a tiger leaps from the gloom ere its presence
is seen or its passage is traced, so his retribution
sprang upon him. All was dark round him ; unin-
telligible, untold ; the prison gates had been broken,
the living sepulchre been unsealed ; his wealth, which
had sent his young kinsman to wander at will in
foreign lands, had been turned into the power which
had loosed the fetters, and released the captivity of
the man he had betrayed and condemned; the net
of his own acts was wound about him ; the dishonour
which had seemed wisdom in his sight had been
forged into the weapon of his own destruction. His !
not his alone, or he had borne it. It was the life of
Lucille that his dead sin -menaced. For her he had
28G STRATIIMOKE.
done this thing ; against her it now rose beyond his
strength to save.
A stunned silence and tranquilHty fell on him ;
suddenly and mutely as poison kills, all his life was
shattered, and all hope destroyed ; there is no resist-
ance in an absolute despair.
He held the letter clenched in his right hand,
his face was grey and bloodless as a dead man's,
he gazed with a blank stare out at the rose-hued,
golden light : the world was unreal about him,
the sun-rays glared blood-red in his sight; he saw
the face of Lucille, but it seemed far off gazing at
him with love that was anguish, with eyes that
pierced his soul and saw the history there, with
holiness that barred him from her and divorced them
for evermore, while she floated farther and farther
from him, borne away by an angel-band.
Dizziness seized him, he felt his senses failing, his
sight growing dim: instinctively he grasped the
marble column near, and strove to keep his con-
sciousness, his calm ; she must not know I
" Not knoiu ! " He remembered that when the
space of that night should be passed the knowledge
of all would have reached her. He knew that she
must die: the life that lived but in his own, and
the yet unborn life that he had given, both perish
through his sin.
9^ ^ St' 'F jfe-
She stood before him, with the fragrant roses in
UNDEE THE WINGS OF THE ANGEL. 287
her hand, and the Hngering stray beams of light
shining in the spiritual sweetness of her eyes.
He shuddered beneath her gaze ; all that was
dearest to him grew worse torture than devils frame.
A little while, and she would know him as he was.
A little while, and she would know that his kiss
was accursed on her lips, that the barrier of an in-
effaceable sin sundered them for ever, that the love
she held the truest guardianship on earth was but a
vain atonement for a brutal crime.
She came and knelt beside him, she wound her
arms about him, she sought his lips with her caresses.
Was he in suffering, was he in pain ? He was silent
to her ! Why ? He would keep nothing that grieved
him from he7'j even in love ?
And he had to smile on her while his heart was
breaking 1 He had to look do^vn into her eyes, while
he knew that towards them stole the doom of his
past ! Imprisoned from her sight througli all her
life, his hidden sin was loosed to rend her from him
and destroy her at the last. And in the failing light
she gazed upward with her deep, dreaming love,
and her lips, mtli the sinless smile of childhood, were
lifted for his kiss !
O God ! the throbs of his heart, as they beat against
hers, must tell her he thought the secret they held ; on
the darkness of his face she must behold the darkness
of his soul ! She' leaned her cheek upon his hand,
the blood-stain there must scorch her. She laid her
288 STEATHMOEE.
head against his breast, the guilt it veiled must
scare her from her resting-place.
The guardian of her peace, the husband of her
youth, the idol of her trustful life and through him
she must die !
His arms closed round her with passionate anguish,
his lips clung to hers with endless kisses, to him it
was as the embrace of death, to him it was hopeless
as an eternal farewell.
Yet he held from her all sign ; he spared her
while he could all knoAvledge of his tortui'e ; he
sacrificed his misery to her, as he would have sacrificed
honour, greatness, life itself, and given himself to an
eternity of woe, could he have bought redemption at
his cost for her alone.
He left her; and she had seen no trace of the
agony which could have broken its bonds, and flung
him at her feet, with tears of blood at every smile her
fond eyes gave to his, at every lingering touch her lips
left on his own. But where she could not follow or
behold him out in the shadows of the falling night,
under the shelter of the leaves that agony had its
way, nature conquered the force that had chained
it down and forbidden it all utterance.
He stood and gazed at her through the unclosed
casements; he knew that in life they might never
meet again. The light fell around her, flowers in a
wilderness of bloom enclosed her, above her, there
stretched through the shadows, the ivory spear, and
UNDER THE WINGS OF THE ANGEL. 289
the white wings, of a sculptured Angel, Ithuriel;
and upward to the statue's face she lifted her soft,
haunting eyes, the eyes where the sadnesss of the
past ever lay beneath the smile of childhood. And
she must perish ! she, the redeemer of his life, by
whom atonement had come to him, through whom all
holier things had touched his heart. He wondered
that he lived ! that dumb, stupified wonder of despair
which seizes those who suffer, those to whom death
will not come.
He saw nothing but her the light shed a halo
like a glory on her brow ; her eyes, looking outward
to the night, seemed to look through his soul ; and
above, where the marble Ithuriel leaned, the white
wings of the guardian angel enclosed her, and the
white spear banned from her, the innocent and the
sacrificed, his love that was accursed, his guilt that
had arisen !
And out of the gloom of the ruined cloisters and
the hanging screens of ivy, there crept a shadow
darker than any on the night; that shadow looked
with him upon the innocence that the white-winged
spirit guarded ; that shadow, unseen by him, followed
him as he went down towards the sea.
It was the form of Marion Vavasour.
VOL. III.
290
CHAPTEE XIX.
" THE BOWS OF THE MIGHTY ARE BROKEN."
The full autumn moon shone on the silent seas,
the grey shades of the mediaeval arches, and the stir-
less boughs drooping above the scattered ivy-covered
graves, as Strathmore went through the night ; went
with his proud head bowed, and all the haughty
serenity of his bearing broken and crushed. For
he went to the man whom he had wronged.
Yaldor leant against a shaft of the ruined abbey,
with the light shining on his face ; the ravages of
captivity and of wretchedness were something worn
away, but beauty, strength, brilliance, all the glory
of manhood were gone, and gone for ever; and
Strathmore shuddered as he looked on him. How
could this man forgive ? To have saved his life he
could have uttered no word, have advanced no step ;
he paused, and stood silent. All the enormity of his
sin seemed to arise and stand betwixt them ; all the
" THE BOWS OF THE MIGHTY AEE BKOKEN." 291
vastness of the mercy he had come to seek seemed to
stretch out, mocking and lost before him. " Mercy ! "
What title to it had he ? he who had ever denied it.
The night was very calm, and its stillness was
unbroken as they met ; the one saw the husband of
Lucille, the other her avenger and destroyer.
" Strathmore ! were you traitor to me ? "
The words fell at last from the man he had
wronged, low, almost gentle, but with reproach pro-
found as that which alone passed the dying Caesar's
lips to him Avhom he had loved too loyally.
Strathmore quivered from head to food ; traitor he
had been, but there was no treachery in his blood.
With a lie he could have disarmed this man ; with a
lie have denied the charge ; there was no proof
against him save such as his own words should give ;
no living soul who could have brought this last sin
home to him save himself. From him whom he had
wronged, moreover, he came to seek a mercy so vast,
that the mercy which spares from death is pale to
it. But while steeped in so much error, lost in so
much crime, he still clung, even in his darkness, in-
stinctively, and at all cost, to Truth. He bowed his
head.
" Yes ! I betrayed you."
"You!''
That one word was all he uttered, but in it all else
was spoken ; the reproach, too deep for passion, too
generous for revenge, of the betrayed who wrote :
" It is not an open enemy who hath done me this
u2
292 STEATHMOEE.
dislionour, for then I could have borne it. It was
even thou, my companioUj my guide, and my own
familiar friend."
" I ! " he lifted his head, and as the moonlight
shone upon it, his face was filled with a terrible
despair, and with that which is worse than suffering,
and which had never before then reached his life
shame. " I betrayed you for her sake ! "
Viler than he was in his o^Yn sight, he could be in
no man's ; abhorrent of his sin, the purest could not
be, more than he was then ; " a traitor ! " many
crimes had stained, but, in his creed, none had dis-
honoured him till this. And the tyrant nature
in him, sickening at its own evil and its own shame,
laid itself bare to the bone, making no plea, seeking
no lie, craving no pardon, asking no palliation, save
such, if any there were, as lay in those brief words,
"for her."
A deep sigh broke from the man he had ruined ; he
had been dealt an injury so vast, that all the life that
lingered in him could not suffice to efface or repair it ;
he had been flung into a living tomb, and been
crushed under a more lingering torture than that
which gives death at a blow ; his cause had been lost,
his manhood had been wrecked, his strength had been
destroyed for ever ; yet his deep wrong was less
before him in that moment than the anguish which
struck him like a knife, that the friend whom he had
honoured and trusted, whose bread he had broken.
i
" THE BOWS OF THE MIGHTY ARE BROKEN." 293
and whose hand he had grasped, should have turned
traitor to him.
" Better have dealt me death than have done friend-
ship this dishonour ! "
The words were brief and simple; wider rebuke
lay in them than lies in invective or in curse : and
Strathmore shuddered as he heard. None knew their
truth more utterly than he ; none honoured honour
more sacredly than he who had violated it ; none held
its laws more just and binding than he who had
broken through them.
He bowed his head as one who bows before the
lash which he merits too deeply to arrest.
" Say what you will ! The vilest words you give
will never reach the vileness of my guilt. I wronged
you more brutally than by a death-thrust; and yet
I sinned for her ! "
As he spoke the last words, his head was reared
with its old royal dignity of bearing, and through
the misery upon his face there flashed the old un-
tameable, inflexible passions which through life had
wrecked his peace and stained his soul.
" I betrayed you to save her from my doom. To
spare myself a thousand deaths I would have never
turned a traitor to a dog that should have trusted
me ; you have known me, you know that ! It was in
his trust. I had sworn her life should be before my
own ; I kept it so. I have been true to him I You do
not loathe me for my wrong to you more vilely than
I loathe myself ; my sin is not blacker and fouler in
294 STEATHMOEE.
your eyes than in mine ; and yet, were it to be done
again, I would do it, if so only 1 could save her ! Crime
is more accursed to me than it ever was to the best
life that ever shrank from it. I sicken for peace, for
rest, for expiation oh, my God, for guiltlessness I
and yet there is no crime I would not take on me if
it could spare her. I owe her all my soul itself ! "
The words rang out on the still night, floating far
over the starlit sea ; his wild erring sacrifice, his guilty
grand defiance flung down before the man who held
so terrible a power of vengeance, blent with the heart-
sickness of despair, the pathos of a vain remorse, the
wretchedness of an utter impotence, of a love that was
powerless to defend or save.
He who heard stood silent and motionless, his eyes
fized on Strathmore's face, on which the light of the
moon fell. His own wrong, his own love, the memory
of all he had endured, the knowledge that he who
stood before him was the husband of Lucille, these
were forgotten in that moment; he only saw the
depth and vastness of this man's guilt, the passion
and the despair of his remorse. All else seemed too
poor, too mean, too utterly of self, to be remembered
then ; all else seemed to float far away into oblivion
before the might of this man's misery, the greatness
of his hopeless thirst and travail for expiation.
Strathmore met his eyes unflinchingly ; criminal
he was, but coward never. He stood erect, his face
white as death and drawn as with the deep and hag-
gard lines of age. He did not plead ; he offered no
word more that could have seemed to seek extenuation
of his sin ; not even for her sake could he stoop to
pray for mercy from the man he had betrayed. He
knew that she must die for he knew that the ghast-
liness of his past, touching her, would slay her, like
the breatli of the destroying angel.
"You have your vengeance ^take it," he said,
calmly, while his voice was changed to a hoarse and
hollow utterance vibrating on the stillness. "Take
it ! It is your right. The innocent and the unborn
will perish together for my guilt. It is no more than
/ merit."
Yaldor shuddered, and the red blood flushed his
face ; for the moment he had risen above the weak-
ness and the error of man, and had remembered alone
pity such as Heaven itself may yield. But he was
human he had loved; with those words he was
dashed back to the frailty of humanity and of passion.
He saw before him the lover, the lord, the possessor
of the life that he had worshipped the husband of
her youth, the father of her child.
A great struggle shook liim, like a storm-wind. He
turned and paced the long stretch of sward under the
ruined aisles, his steps falling in heavy uneven measure
on the silence that Avas only stirred by the sighing of
the waves, far down below, beyond the ghmmer of the
moonlit leaves.
If ever man strove between good and evil, he
wrestled with his tempters then. But not for the first
time did he come to the conflict, nor for the first time
296 STRATHMORE.
had he conquered. Long ago he had striven to have
strength for this hour if it came ; and he had strength
now.
He drew near and stood before Strathmore in the
grey calm shadow of the monastic burial-place, beside
the ivy-covered lowly grave on which that solitary
word was carved,
ilucillf.
"Could you not trust me in so little? True, I
spoke to you in madness ; I refused you mercy in
the blind hate of passion ; I knew not what I did !
But could you not have known me well enough to
know that, when that hom^ was passed, I should
regret? Could you believe that, in cold blood, I
should have been so vile as to take from you what
loved and was loved by you ? Could you think that
your appeal would not disarm me, that your remorse
and your atonement would have no sanctity in my
sight? I spoke in haste I erred; but before the
night was passed I had repented."
" Repented I Oh, my God ! and I "
The words rang out like a great death-cry over the
silent seas.
" And you misjudged me ! As you misjudge me
now. It is not for me to revenge your guilt and
revenge it on the guiltless ! It is not for her to suffer
because I was wronged such vengeance would be
for devils I Your secret is safe your remorse is
" THE BOWS OF THE MIGHTY AEE BROKEN." 297
sacred with me. Lucille shall never learn that you
were her father's destroyer; she shall never know
that she was Erroll's child. I came to say this to you
this only. Friendship is ended for ever between
us; but there may be still, at the least forgive-
ness."
In his eyes, as he spoke, there was a divine light,
and in his voice a divine pity ; noiselessly, swiftly, as
though to put aside all answer, and to spare him
whom he had pardoned from his own gaze, he turned
and went through the soft shadows of the leaves,
through the twilight of the ruined aisle, through the
stillness of the night, away down to where the sea
lay. And the man whom crime had not made a
coward, to whom remorse had not taught mercy, in
whom misery had not availed to bring humility and
pity, who had trusted to the strength of his own hand,
and the mailed might of his own will, and had been
his own god, his own judge, his own law, trembled
like a great tree stricken at its roots as he heard tlie
words which spared him, the words of that mercy
which he had ever denied; and he fell down on the
sward, stricken there motionless, prostrate, voiceless,
as in the years that were gone he had fallen by the
side of the dead whom he had slain. Never had his
sin looked so great to him as in that hour in which its
vengeance was withheld from him ; never had his
soul been so near to its redemption as now, when its
vileness looked darkest in his sight, and was laid bare
298 STEATHMORE.
in the light of an unhoped deliverance, till he beheld
it as it was beheld of God.
Ont of the shadow of the arches stole the human
shadow that had followed him. With the glide of a
snake she swept through swathes of light and breadths
of gloom, through tangled grasses heavy with rain,
and wide, endless stretches of park land, broken up
in hill and dale, with forest-trees and deep deer-pools.
As the snake steals its rapid way, so she stole on hers,
swift as a stag's flight, passing, as though borne on
the wind, through the twilight of the still and silvery
night.
She had his secret she had her vengeance. And
ever as she went, with her amber hair loosening in
the breeze sweeping from the sea, and something of
her lost dead beauty lent to her face in that moonlit
gleam, as her eyes flashed once more with the evil
triumph, the victorious and cruel lust of the years
that were gone, Marion Vavasour murmured ever,
till the words were borne in strange wild rhythm on
the woodland silence far away, to join the ceaseless
lulling of the waves :
" Such mercy as you gave, I give to you no
more ! "
Lucille watched for him.
The night was hushed and very soft, with the light
of the stars falling over the vast depths of woodland,
stretching downward to the sea; and as she gazed
upon it, while the west wind played among her hair,
and the fragrance of dew-laden flowers rose upward
from the grass below, her eyes filled with tears the
tears of a joy beyond words, that trembled even at
its own intensity. She was so happy ! she who
shared his life as no other had ever shared it.
The murmur of the sea, the low glad belling of the
deer, the odour of every blossom that was borne on
the wings of the wind, the silver gleam on every leaf
that quivered in the moonbeams, these were all poems
to her sweet voices that chimed in with the i^ejoicing
of her life. And where she leaned, with the dreaming
lustre in her childlike eyes, and the star -rays circling
her fair bowed head, her lips moved in prayer,
pure as the prayer of infancy, and as unquestion-
ing in faith. Prayer for all things that suffered ; for
all lives that needed pity ; for all who were weary and
travel-laden, and had sinned against the holiness of
love ; for all the homeless and the desolate, who bore
the heat and burden of the day, and knew the shadow
of that merciless calamity whose knowledge had
never touched her ; prayer of that compassion which
nses from the fullness and the gratitude of joy, and
from the glory of its own hushed gladness remem-
bers and looks back on those who suffer, and pleads
for them even as angels plead.
The night itself seemed to grow holier about her,
the silence to pause in purer and gentler vigil around
300 STKATHMORE.
the sanctity of those early years, and God's own pre-
sence to encircle and to shield the life which knew
him without fear as Love alone.
And towards her, through the darkness, with the
noiseless swiftness of the wind, stole the shadow of
the destroyer.
301
CHAPTEK XX.
He lay stretched on the dank earth without move-
ment, save for the shudder that now and again ran
through his frame. His guilt had been abhorred from
the first hour of its committal, but his pride had re-
mained with him unchastened, unbent, untaught, to
work its doom by its scornful and blasphemous deifi-
cation of will and of power. Now this, too, was
stricken from his hands his own weakness had come
home to him, he had been strengthless before the
recoil of his acts, he had recognised the supreme
wisdom of the truth, without which all lives are at
best but of warped beauty and of splendid error the
truth which lies in following that which is just, letting
result come as it may with the future.
He had been spared I The warmth, the redemp-
tion, the divinity of that mercy which he had ever
denied, had touched him as the light of morning
touches the gloom, till all that is dark and impure is
302 STRATHMORE.
bathed in its glory. Mercy, likeness and attribute of
Godj which when it comes to earth makes man god-
like, he had always thrust from him ; he had veiled
his face and closed his heart to it ; remorse had never
taught him pardon ; striving for atonement, he had
never taken its first step forgiveness. All its soft-
ness, all its nobility, all its serene and sanctified
humanity, had been dead to him, rejected, scorned,
destroyed : and now it had risen and saved him,
and in its light he saw the vastness of his owTi
sin.
All his past life lived once more for him through
those long and solitary hours : as men drowning in
the great waste of the sea remember every face, every
link, in the years that are ended for ever, so he saw
all the forgotten things of his youth and of his man-
hood. He seemed to look back on his life as from
the depths of a grave, and to behold it proud,
powerful, generous, honom'ed amongst men ; but
stained with error, wrecked by passion, riven at the
core by the curse of one crime, and never reaching
expiation because never bending to humiliation. For
he had never forgiven ! he had never learned that
frailty in his own life commanded from him pardon
to others even for seventy times seven ; he had never
recognised that his own criminality forbade to him
for ever the right of judgment, and enjoined on him
to his grave the duty of an exhaustless clemency, un-
swerving, unweakened, whatever temptation might
assail.
" m THE SILENCE OF THE NIGHT." 303
He had never forgiven ! there, worse than in the
first-born crime which had sprung from the blindness
of his passions, lay the depth of his sin, the vainness
of his atonement.
The night was very still.
There was no breath among the falling leaves, no
movement except the ceaseless ebbing of the sea
below. Countless stars shone without a floating
cloud to veil them, and the long iv^^ coils over the
lonely graves lay dark and stirless in the moonlight.
There was not a sound borne on the air, not a
shudder that stole through the autumnal forests ;
the silent hours swept on unmeasured and un-
broken for the night did not whisper the secrets
it shrouded, the cold stars had no pity and uttered no
warning, the world reeled on, and the innocent were
unguarded, and the face of God was unseen.
Slowly and dully through the hush of the night
there swung the midnight chimes of the abbey, iron
strokes that dealt out the merciless passage of time,
shado\Ay bells that echoed mournfully over the
waters, wild beating cadences, now lost, now heard,
dimly flung out in waves of sound upon the silence.
Their melody fell upon his ear, and throbbed through
his brain with a strange jarring echo, unreal and
yet familiar; he rose slowly to his feet, and lifted
his face to the coolness of the night. Beneath,
stretched the silvered seas, where life and death had
wrestled for him ; around him was the deep and
solemn tranquillity, when all things are at rest ;
304 STEATHMOEE.
above, the star-lighted vault that reached onward
and upward to the infinite.
Mercy! the whole night seemed to throb with
that one word ; the sea in its depths munnured it to
him by whom it had been denied ; the weary bells as
they swung through the stillness bore it upon the wind.
Mercy ! he had no right to it ; no title to it ; what
his life had refused, his life could not claim. Mercy !
Above, in the lustre of the skies, the light of Heaven
seemed shining with the glory that is Forgiveness ;
and below, in the black and endless waste of the
ocean, lay the abyss into which his risen sin seemed
to force the life that had been without compassion.
He stretched his arms out to the dark and fathom-
less gulf that had been his righteous doom, and
upward to that cloudless light which never till now
had shone for him, which now seemed dying from
his sight ere he could reach it, or implore it to stay
with him yet ^yet to redeem him ! That voiceless
prayer went up to God in the silence of the night ;
who shall say that it was lost ?
He turned from the solitary shore, and took his
homeward way through the shadows of the old
monastic burial-place, where the sepulchres were
made above the sounding of the sea, and were turned
eastwards, that the light of early dawn, breaking on
the world, might shine first upon them the dead.
He reeled back, struck as with his death-thrust.
Between him and the twilight of the stars, stand-
305
iiig out from the darkness of the ivied gloom, like
a -vvraith from the tomb, rose the form of Marion Yava-
som\
With her amber hair floating on the winds,
with a wild beauty come back to her from that
hour from her past, with the light of a merciless
triumph, and the shadow of a deathless grace
strangely blent wdth the soiled torn garments of
an outcast, and the lost misery of one in whom shame
had perished for ever, she rose in his path ^now, as
before, claiming him hers by right of that compa-
nionship in guilt, by title of their mutual bond of
sin. Temptress, traitress, assassinatress, she returned
to him after the long flight of years, holding him yet
her own by the close tie of died-ont passions and of
buried sins ; and behind the ruthless cruelty of the
destroyer there looked the grand and austere justice
of the Avenging Angel.
For her the sin had been sinned ; by her came its
retribution.
There, between the skies and him, she rose, hover-
ing, as it seemed, upon the watery mists, the shining
brilliance of the night ; and he gazed at her, filled
with the speechless horror that had come on him when
he had seen her face rise out of the depths of the sea
in the white storm-flame.
A mocking mirth rang down the stillness of the
night, vibrating through the chimes of midnight bells,
echoing above the sounding of the seas :
" At last, Strathmore ! at last ! "
VOL. III. X
306 STRATHMOEE.
"At last!"
The words broke from his lips in an unconscious
echo, while the great dews gathered on his forehead,
and in his eyes came the agony of the stag hunted to
bay and caught within the toils. The supreme hour
of his life, the supreme retribution of his sin had
come. A shiver ran through his frame ; he had
loved her ! So well, so well ! as never man loved
woman, and even now the music that still lingered in
her voice thrilled through him with its melody. It
was the echo of his past ; the echo of his youth.
Had that love ever wholly died, though hate had
trodden it out and been greater than its greatest?
Love is its own avenger.
"At last!" She seemed to float still before him
on the shadowy luminance of the starry night, her hair
flung out upon the winds, her wreck of broken and
dishonoured loveliness a spectre risen from the buried
years. " My lover, who lived but in my life, who
saw no sun but in my eyes, who held crime sweet if I
but bade it ! did you think we were parted for ever ?
did you dream that the years could long sunder us ?
did you not know I should soon or late claim you my
own ? You are mine you are mine ! To-night I take
back my empire ! "
Mute, blind, paralysed, he stood and gazed at her,
the sickness of horror on him ; on the silvery mists of
the night the words lingered ; a strange triumph blent
with the rich and thrilling melody of voice. Ghastlier
than any curse of vengeance, more horrible than any
" IN THE SILENCE OF THE NIGHT." 307
dagger-stroke dealt him, were those words that spoke
to him in the love-tones of old! were those words
which across the great chasm of crime and enmity
floated to him and smote him with his past !
Her langh rang down again, breaking the murmnr
of the seas.
"What! no word when I claim back my sove-
reignty ? No vow, no kiss ? Yon ! my lost lover
who adored the very roses that my lips had pressed,
who let honour drift away, a jeered and useless thing,
to lie at my feet, to rest in my bosom, to gaze in my
eyes ; who wooed and courted guilt, as others glory,
when my hand pointed, and my voice whispered it %
What ! no caress, no oath, no gratitude, when by our
love I claim you, and own you, alone to-night ? What !
the roses are dead, is the love dead too ? The mur-
dered are buried, is the love buried too ? "
" In mercy, in pity, be silent ! "
The words broke, inarticulate, from his throat;
he thought her senses gone, and in the chastened
passions, and pride, the poignant remorse, and self-
abasement of that hour, he knew himself too deeply
guilty to have title to lift himself above her, or
wi'eak his wrongs on his destroyer. The evil had
gone from him, the hatred from his life; in his
own sight his infamy was now so great that it
lowered hers, and withheld her from his vengeance.
The relentless and iron hate with which it had
pursued her had died when the light of mercy had
shone on his heart, and the appeal to Heaven been
x2
308 STEATHMOEE.
on liis lips ; if she liacl tempted, he had avenged ;
if she had murdered with her lie, he had slaughtered
with his hand. What was he that he had title to
condemn this woman, vast as were his wrongs, wide
as were her crimes ?
She drew nearer to him, leaning on the flickering
brilliance of the night like a spirit borne upon the
air ; and as her eyes gazed closer into his, as her hair
floated in the light, as nearer and nearer came that
soiled, broken, ruined wreck of all that she had been,
she saw him shudder and reel back, and close his eyes
to shut out that mockery and resmTection of the past*
" Silent? silent?" she echoed. "Why, the days
were when the world had no music for you but my
voice! when but to hear me murmur those fool's
words, ^ I love you I ' honour, duty, brotherhood, men's
laws, and God's commands, were all thought worth-
less ! ' Eternal love, eternal love ! ' that was what you
vowed me : though the earth should be shattered,
and the heavens should flame like a scroll, we were to
love for ever ! Heaven itself was not to sever us !
Ah ! and the love lasted but the life of the rose ! "
" Oh God, cease ! "
Her words as they lingered down the air with all
the unforgotten melody of old, mocking, terrible, yet
with a strange and bitter sadness sighing through
them, the lament of youth, the weariness of despair
pierced him to the quick, till the pent suffering of
years broke out and poured itself before the woman
" IN THE SILENCE OP THE NIGHT." 309
by whom his youth had been destroyed, his hfe been
wrecked.
" Love ? love ? Dare you speak it to me ?" he cried
aloud. " Ay, I loved you, Heaven help me ! I loved
you, better than life, or guiltlessness, or brotherhood,
or God ; sorceress, temptress, traitress, that you were !
You had my life, my heart, my honour, all that was
mine on earth and in eternity. What were they to
you ? Toys that you played with, and hurled back
into ruin : slaves that you dragged at your feet for
the whole world to laugh at, then steeped in blood
and hounded on to murder ! "
A tearless sob caught his breath, and broke heavily
on the silence of the night, then the loosened rush of
words swept on again, all the silent reproach, all the
crushed-out misery of so many years breaking their
prison before the woman who had known his madness,
made his doom, and suffered from his vengeance.
" Is there measurement for your sin to me ?
Guilty I was, but not to you ; shame was glorious
for you, death welcome for you, dishonour sweet for
you ! I gave you all the glory of my manhood, I
gave you all the peace of my whole life, I gave you
more a devil's gift, yet given because I loved you
his blood ! sacrificed, guiltless his blood, that is on
me and mine for me ! Your crime is without end to
me ; to my dying hour the guilt you scourged me to,
is on me ; it poisons every innocent thing, it curses
every hope of peace ; every year the roses bloom, I
310 STRATHMOEE.
think of you ; every summer sun that sets, I see his
death-agony, I hear liis dying words, I know I
shxughtered him as wild beasts kill what they hate.
Oh, God ! the vileness of your sin was never equalled
upon earth save save by the vileness of my own."
Her eyes fastened on him with a strange look that
seemed to burn through the misty brilliance round
them, wildly mournful, cruelly triumphant ; to-night,
for one brief hour at least, she took back her empire, she
ruled him, she tortured him, she shook his passions as
the cycloon shakes the cedars ; she alone was remem-
bered by him. His proud and ice-cold life still was
riven to its centre by her ; in all its mailed and kingly
power, within it had ever lived the agony of a cheated
love, the tortm^e of a deathless remorse ; he had never
forgotten the idolatry of his youth, he had never
ceased to suif er ! And the vain and evil triumph of
her nature flashed out with exultation, even while
her eyes dwelt on him with pain, which in her, too,
wearied for the past which in her, too, yearned
towards all that was lost for ever !
" Vile as it was," she said, slowly, " you revenged
it as brutally ! Once you drove me out to what was
worse than death, once you loosed me to death itself,
and the storm and the waves knew more mercy than
you!"
".Such mercy as you gave, I gave to you ! " the
words that he had spoken in the past, broke uncon-
sciously once more from his lips, hoarse with anguish,
"in the silence of the night." 311
pleading not with her, but with the condemnation
of his conscience, the accusation of his past. " I
pursued you, I destroyed you, I hunted you down
to ruin, as you had hunted me to fratricide. I bade
you die the death that you had dealt to him. I had
no pity / who should have seen my brotherhood in
the foulest criminals that taint the earth, who should
have known that I had forfeited for ever my right to
judgment ! But it was not my wrongs that I re-
venged, it was not the curse on my life that I remem-
bered when I smote you, it was his ! Guiltless, you
slew him. Loyal, and just, and stainless, your lie
hurled him to his grave. That was your crime for
that my vengeance. Answer me now, before God,
you who made me his murderer, you who slew him
without pity in his glory and his youth answer me,
was the vengeance greater than the crime ? "
AYhere she stood before him, she to whom crime
had been triumph and duty fable, who had been with-
out pity and without remorse, shrank for one moment
as though struck to the heart ; then she raised herself
slowly in the starlight, with something of the old
grand grace and sovereign gesture of the past, while
for once in her eyes there was no evil, for once on her
lips no lie.
" Greater ? No ! But it was not you7^ hand which
should have dealt it, Strathmore."
He bowed his head where he stood in the bright
mist shininii from the sea.
312 STEATHMORE.
" I know it, now ! Your sin was mine, and mine
was yonrs. / had no right to strike you, // who
was guiltier yet than you."
He had drunk the bitterest dregs in the cup of his
chastisement ; he had vanquished the darkest passion
of his nature ; he had taken submissively as his due
the crudest stripe of his scourge, now, when to the
woman who had been his betrayer he spoke in peace,
and accepting her sin as his own, laid down his rights
of vengeance.
She was silent, in her eyes passionate hate and
wild regret, love that seemed to live again, victory
strange and nameless, passions dead, and conscience
weakened, seemed to gleam, all mingled and in con-
flict, and burn through the floating shadows of the
night; while on the stillness there only broke the
sighing of the midnight seas, the echo of the mid-
night bells. She leaned nearer yet towards him, her
hair driving backward in the wind, the ravages of
time and shame fallen from her in the softened
shade ; and with that gesture both remembered how
she had once pressed his hand against her bosom and
bidden him go sin for her, when with tiger-thirst she
panted for blood, for life !
" Strathmore ! I wronged you once ; I came to-
night to wrong you more. I murdered once ; I came
to-night to slaughter yet again ! Years ago, in my
extremity, you said such mercy as I gave, you gave
to me. Such mercy I came to-night to give to you
no more !"
" IN THE SILENCE OF THE NIGHT." 313
She saw liim stagger again, she heard one con-
vulsed and tearless sob break again upon the stilhiess,
she saw in his eyes gather the wikl and hunted misery
that she had known, and in that moment the vile
and cruel nature inborn in the traitress revived and
ruled. He suffered ! he suffered ! She had her
triumph ; she had her foot upon the haughty, hum-
bled neck ; she had her hand upon the proud, mailed
heart, to wring it as she would. Through all the
course of baffled years she had waited for that hour
and it was hers.
Her laugh, jeering, victorious, abhorrent in its
melody, rang on the air.
" Ah ! the love lived but the life of the rose you
have replaced it. Why leave what you cherish ? We
can strike you through her ! While she sleeps in her
innocence, and dreams of your kisses, the w^hisper can
steal to her that will scare sleep for ever, and tell her
the life that her husband destroyed."
A cry from him broke her words a cry so terrible,
so heart-broken, that as it echoed down the lonely
shore and far across the waves, those sleeping out at
sea heard it, and woke and shuddered, thinking it the
death-wail of some drowning man sinking, beyond
help, in the solitude of the ocean. It silenced
even her.
This had been her coveted lust ; this had been the
moment for which she had watched, and waited, and
pursued, and endured the weary course of loathsome
years. He suffered ! where she hovered, shadow-like,
314 STEATHMORE.
before his aching sight, her eyes seemed to pierce
through into his hfe, her laugh to echo with a devil's
joy. His secret in her hands! his darling's peace
laid at her mercy ! than whom the panther were
gentler to move, the vulture w^ere more pitiful to
spare ! His lips parted, but formed no sound, the
great drops stood like the sweat of death upon his
brow, his limbs trembled, his eyes were fastened on
her with a dumb, agonised appeal. If before that
horn' retribution had never overtaken him, in it re-
tribution would have fallen on him vast as his dead
crime.
"Your lips were mine !" she cried, laughing still
in that mocking mirth ; " their kisses must poison
hers. Your hand slew him ! its touch must pollute
hers. Oh, lover, who lived but in my smile ! did you
not know the dead passion would rise up and curse
the new ? Oh, lord of the iron will ! did you dream
that you were stronger than fate, and vengeance, and
a woman's hate, and think you could strangle your
secret, and shelter youi' darling for ever? What!
while the earth held your crime, and I still had life ?
while the red grasses had once ch'unk his blood,
and I lived to tell her the hidden sin of her husband ?
Strathmore, Strathmore ! was that your wisdom, that
your strength ? Oh, fool, who thought yourself as
deity ! Oh, madman, who hoped that the past could
ever be silenced ! "
The words vibrated through the air, ringing high
in cruel mockery, throbbing on the stillness with
" IN THE SILENCE OF THE NIGHT." 315
tlieir irony, piercing him with iron thrust ; and
his agony broke out in a single prayer, not to her,
never to her, but to the Eternity that shone above
and gazed upon him through the calm eyes of the
stars.
^' Lucille ! Lucille ! Oh, God of the guiltless,
save her!"
The prayer rang through the silence as though
pleading at the very throne of heaven, borne there
by all the voices of the night ; before its anguish her
laugh died, the triumph faded from her eyes, a sigh
ran through her.
" God of the guiltless ! he is not our God ! "
In the words there were the wild regret, the pas-
sionate derision, of a life dimly waking to remorse,
and struggling under the heavy, stifling burden of
unrepented sins and of inexpiable crimes.
"But he is hers!''
The answer was still a prayer, broken, hopeless,
pleading; not to his tortm-er, not to his destroyer,
but to those serene and lustrous worlds in which
were spoken the majesty and the pity of the Infinite.
Could they look on and see the sinless perish % Would
the God she worshipped in her childlike trust, with
every sun that rose and every night that fell, desert
her now^ ? The night swam round him, the noise of
the waves surged in his brain, his lips were white
and cloven, his eyes saw nothing but the face of
his destroyer, and the radiance of the heavens shining
far away.
316 STRATHMOEE.
There was no thouglit of violence, no instinct to
crime in him now, sin had lost its hold upon his sonl,
for belief in immortality had risen there ; there was
nothing but a stunned, dull despair, in which he saw
his own deed recoil upon the innocent, and was
powerless to shield or save her.
Marion Vavasour stood and gazed on him, and in
her eyes there gleamed that strange and nameless
blending of hate and love, of triumph and regret, of
mocking victory and of futile pain, which had come
there before; if ever in her life she had loved, she
had loved him, and she thought of the glory of her
womanhood, the splendour of her power, when his
life had been hers, and her loveliness had bound him
in its golden chains ; she thought of the great passion
that he had poured out at her feet, and that she had
cheated, ruined, and driven to its guilt.
In his presence something of the brutality of hate
perished ; something of the memory of love revived.
She leaned nearer to him once more, with a relic
of the jDroud and soA'ereign grace returned to the dark,
dishonoured wretchedness of the Outcast.
" The God of the guiltless ! We know no God,
you and I. We know that if there be a God, he
sends his sunlight on the criminal, and lets the sinless
perish. You have lived in honour, and riches, and
power, and men's esteem, and I in beggary, and
misery, and shame. What justice is there there f Our
sin was mutual ! Since I am a wanderer and an out-
cast, so should you be; since I am homeless, and
317
dishonoured, so should you be. Our guilt was
equal, why not our punishments? If I deal you
back your cruelty and your vengeance to-night ; if I
tell you such mercy as you gave I give to you ; if
I smite you with your dead crime, what is it more
than justice?"
His head sank ; he knew it was no more. And a
great darkness covered his sight, hiding the radiance
of the stars ; his life was held in the iron bonds of a
pitiless retribution, and in his misery the voice of the
woman who had been his temptress came to him like
the voice of vengeance, inexorable, but just.
"No more," she echoed, slowly. "No more to
you. Listen, Strathmore ! Since the hour that we
parted I have had but one aim, one toil, one thirst,
one hope to destroy you pitilessly as you destroyed
me. To see you suffer, to see you fall, to \ATing your
heart, to kill your pride, to make every breath a pang
to you, to have you at my mercy and deny it you, to
shame, dishonour, scourge you, curse you. I have
only lived for that ! "
The words had risen, hissing through the night like
a snake's hiss, all the intensity of hate that she had
cherished vibrating through them, and showing him
the black and fathomless abyss on which he stood
oi;e gesture of her hand, and he must fall, dragging
downward the soilless life he loved, to perish in his
guilt.
No word escaped him, no movement, his blood was
ice, his breath crushed ; all of life that was in him
318 STEATHMORE.
gazed out from the agony of liis eyes ; it was the
petrefaction of despair.
Yet even now even for the innocent he would
not plead to her. She might destroy she could not
abase him. She saw it; and out of the poignant
virulence of her hate, a kindred grandeur, a wild re-
verence, flashed from the proud instincts of Marion
Vavasour's nature for this man, who even in crime,
even in torture, never wholly lost his greatness.
" I came to destroy you ! Why not ? Why not ?
The tiger does not spare its fangs, nor the vulture
its fury ; while neither hate what they pursue as I
have hated," she said slowly, while her voice sank
lower and thrilled its rich music through the night.
" I have your secret, Strathmore. I can slay what
you love to-night. I can whisper to her what her
husband is ; and the day when it breaks will find
her dead. Oh, Heaven ! I have longed for it ! I
have only lived for that to strike her in your arms,
to rend her out of your honour and shelter, to crush
her down where youi' love cannot shield her or reach
her, to take her youth, her loveliness, her innocence,
and make them vile as my life, to have no pity on
her, and torture you through her, till in all your
years you should have learnt no misery such as that
love should bring you. I hated her I cursed
her ! "
He stayed her with a gesture, grand in its com-
mand, supreme in its agony :
" IN THE SILENCE OF THE NIGHT." 319
" Peace ! Slay her if you must with my guilt,
but never clare to curse her you ! her father's
murderess."
Her eyes dwelt on him with a nameless pain, a
softened light, in which their evil and their lust
were quenched : she flung her arms up toward the
skies, and raised her shameless and dishonoui'ed brow
to the pure cool of the autumnal skies.
" Oh, God ! to-night I too remembered that ! I
had your secret ; I panted to destroy her ; the wind
was not swifter than I as I went to my ven-
geance [ "
Again over the seas rang the cry of a man in his
extremity it was past then her vengeance ! God
had looked on and seen the guiltless perish !
" It was so sweet so sweet, that death-blow to
strike 6of/i," and her voice rose higher, piercing
through the air, while still she raised her face upward
upward to the light of the stars. " She was alone
your love, your strength, your power, could do no-
thing to shield her then. The night gave her to me,
there where she leaned in its starlight, watching for
you. There was no arm to protect her no eye to be-
hold us. She was mine ! mine to crush with my hand
like a bird or a flower mine to kill with more torment
still by your crime, and I could have stamped her life
out as we tread out an insect's ; and I longed for it,
hungered for it, pined for it. And yet is there a
God'? Does he keep even us from the last depths
320 STEATHMOEE.
of hell? Wliere I crouched in the darkness, I
heard her pray, pray for all things that suffered,
for all that were in sin and woe ; in her joy, in
her youth, she prayed for us the guilty and the
cursed ! The light was on her and I saw in hers
her father's eyes, her father's smile; I remembered
how I had murdered him ! I could not slay her then
not then even though you loved her. I could not
touch her ^look on her breathe near her. Her
prayer stood between us, her father's memory held
her from me, the dead himself smote my vengeance
from my hands. I spared her ! / the world must
end to-night!"
Her laugh rang on the air in mockery of herself
then into her burning, weary eyes tears rushed for
the first time since years of shame ; she quivered from
head to foot, and stood there, in the starlight trembling
and afraid. In fear of him ? No ; in fear of that
long and shameless evil which was called her Life.
He heard her; and on his face there shone a
sudden light, pure, cloudless, glorified, like that of
the planets above. In torture she had not abased
him, in agony she had not humbled him, in ven-
geance she had not laid him suppliant ; but noAv in
that hour of release, when into the darkness of his
life the ransom of an unhoped mercy came she had
her victory. She saw him bow down before her,
broken, blinded, voiceless, senseless, his haughty
power smitten as a granite shaft is smitten by the
"in the silence of the night." 321
lightning, his proud life pierced and shaken to the
core, his soul laid bare and without shield, in the mo-
ment of his deliverance.
By her had come his guilt ; by her also came his
retribution and his redemption.
The skies reeled round him in whirling circles of
starry light; the silence of the night seemed filled
with murmuring hosts of angel voices ; the dead past
seemed to fall from him for ever, and be swept away
into those still and lustrous seas that echoed at his
feet ; and on the air, borne up on the winds and on
the waves, he heard the dying words of the man whom
he had loved and slain : " I forgive ! Oh God ! /
forgive ! " as though by that forgiveness pleading
there for the pardon of the guilty, for the safety
of the sinless.
He had forgiven : who should avenge ?
In the silence where they stood together, Strath-
more lifted his head and looked on her, the vulture
that had spared, the panther that had known some
pang of pity at the last ; and in her he saw, incar-
nated, his own merciless and brutal sin saw it,
loathsome as it was, denying the pardon which it lived
to need, usurping the power and the judgment of
deity to sate through them the vilest passions of
mortality.
His limbs shook, his lips quivered, ins forehead was
wet with the dews of a great suffering, but on his face
shone that liglit which once before had come there
VOL. HI. Y
322 STRATHMORE.
when he had stood on the wreck of the sinking ship
with death upon him, and the mad waves leaping
round ; and in his ejes as they dwelt on her there
was a profound anguish, gentle, fathomless, merciful,
in the consciousness of his own weakness, giving
forgiveness to her at the last, by whom his sin had
come, by whom his years had been accursed.
It was the supreme expiation of his life.
He stretched his hands towards her where she
stood, and his voice vibrated with an infinite pardon
through the night :
"The mercy you remembered to her, be remem-
bered to you at the last, by her God! We both
murdered him with brutal guilt ; we have both
striven to atone to him through the innocent. Let
us part in peace to-night ; let sin be dead in both our
lives for ever."
She looked at him one moment, in one long, last,
mute farewell ; then she bowed her head in silent
acceptation of his words of peace, of his renunciation
of the power of evil ; and like a shadow on the air,
a spirit on the wind, Marion Vavasour swept from
him through the autumn night and through the white
and wreathing mists that floated from the sea, and
faded from his life for evermore.
And once again, like a man bruised and stunned
by mortal blow, he sank down among the coiling ivy
and the sea-splashed stones, his arms outstretched.
" IN THE SILENCE OF THE NIGHT." 323
his limbs shaken by a voiceless agony, alone in the
silence of the night. For he had loved her ; he had
sinned for her, and all the irrevocable crime of those
dead years was but the darker and more deeply damned
in his own sight, because the pity of God had touched
his life with an exhaustless and unutterable mercy,
and had spared him the just harvest of his work when
his guilt arose to destroy the innocent, and the strength
of his own hand was stricken powerless.
324
CHAPTER XXI.
" POI USCIMMO A REVERDER' LE STELLE."
In the still night Lucille lay sleeping, as the
young flower sleeps, unconscious of the ruthless hand
that has been stretched to break and to despoil it, and
that has passed over it without harm because its love-
liness brought back a pang of memory, an echo of
lost youth. Through the lofty casement left open to
the night there shone the tranquil and star-studded
skies, there came the far melodious murmur of the
seas ; and straying through dark traceries of foliage
and the deep hues of the painted panes, the light fell
on her where she slept, and shed its halo round her.
Her hair swept backward in its golden masses, a
dreaming smile was on her lips, a soft flush on her
brow, on which the chastened brilliance of the moon-
light fell, and in her sleep she murmured, as though
her dreams were seraphs' whispers,
" God is Love ! "
" POI USCIMMO A REVEEDEK* LE STELLE." 325
They were the last words of her evening prayer;
the words that had stricken strengthless the hand
which had been lifted to destroy her.
He heard them as, from the lonely shore, he
came into her presence as to some divine and sacred
thing, and stood to look on her in the repose of
innocence and childhood, unconscious of the peril
that had drawn near her in the silence and the
solitude of the defenceless night, to strike her with
his sin, and sacrifice her for his guilt drawn so
near! so near! He shuddered and sickened at its
memory, gazing on her with bursting heart and
yearning eyes, listening for every soft pulse of her
young life, watching for every noiseless breath that
passed her lips, for every smile that dreaming lent its
light to sleep, as though she had been given back to
him from the hideousness of death by storm, by flame,
by poisoned steel, or by plague-tainted air. His dead
sin had risen, and had crept to her to slay her with
his past. And he had thought to bury sin and bid it
keep its peace, and have no resurrection ! Oh, fool !
oh, fool !
" God is Love ! "
Yes ! God was Love, since he had saved her. He
heard the words murmured in her happy rest, where
she dreamed of angel voices and of lands beyond
the sun ; and the smile upon her lips, where she lay
in the serene and silvered glory of the heavens, lulled
to slumber by the gentle echoes of the distant seas,
smiled on him with pardon from the dead, with mercy
236 STRATHMOKE.
for the past, with promise for the future, with light
from Him by whom no prayer remains unheard and
no remorse denied.
Burning tears rose into his aching eyes, deep sobs
shook his frame ^it was the agony of gratitude, the
dehrium of release ; and as he threw himself down
beside her bed, his arms cast over her in her sleep,
his head bowed upon the loose trail of her bright hair,
Strathmore lay down for ever the sins and the passions
of his past, and gave, as to the hand of God, his dedi-
cation to a life that should know no law save of
mercy, no governance save of compassion, no pause
in self-humiliation, no pity in self-sacrifice, no effort
but for redemption, no travail but for expiation a
life that should hold its holiest as nothing worth, its
best as nothing given.
And the tender chastened light of the morning
stars, growing clearer and clearer to the dawn in
which the shadows of the night were fading, shone on
him where he knelt beside the deep pure sleep of
innocence.
*****
Away in the deep heart of the great western
forests, in the silence of the solitary swamps, where
pestilence is abroad in the torrid noons, and miasma
rises with every night that falls, where the dank
leaves drop death, and the graves lie thick under the
cypress-woods, a woman in the Order of St. Vincent
" POI USCIMMO A reveeder' le stelle." 327
de Paul lives ever among the poor, the suffering,
the criminal, the shameless, sparing herself no task,
fearing no death dead to the world, as the world is
dead to her. For the dying her voice has a strange
rich music, far beyond all other; for the innocent
her look has a nameless terror, it is often very evil
still; for those who are in dishonour, or in danger,
her lips have a wild, sweet eloquence that scares them
back from their abyss, and leaves them saved but
sore afraid ; for none has she a history. Once, when
in her path some summer roses bloomed, and in the
sunlight threw their soft fragrance on the wind, they
saw tears gather in her eyes, and fall, slowly, as
though each tear were a pang; then alone did they
ever see that she thought of her youth, that she
remembered her past.
In the press of the great world, far sundered from
her by whom his guilt came, through whom his guilt
still pursues him, one man lives who joins to the life
that is known of men, a life that is unknown by any.
A life, in which those who weary and are heavy laden
are aided by a hand that they never see; in which
every shape of suffering is sought and succoured;
in which all evil memories that tempt, are crushed
out, as in a debt that is due ; in which all deeds of
sacrifice are done with a strength that is merciless
only to itself ; in which a sweet and sinless happiness
sheds its radiance ; yet in which the poignancy of one
remorse, the memory of one crime, are never lulled
to peace or to oblivion, but, following the appointed
328 STRATHMORE.
travail of a silent expiation offered only to the dead,
and of a supreme duty rendered for conscience' sake
alone, lay subject the stained greatness of a grand
and guilty nature, and lift it upwards into holier
light.
By passion his life fell, lost in darkness of the
night, and sunk in lowest deeps ; yet, tljough once
fallen, who shall dare deny that, in the end, it shall
not reach to that atonement which unceasingly is
besought, obedient to the law which lies on every
human soul, seeking for purification, striving for
immortality, rising nearer and higher towards the
perfect day, onward to
Other heights, in other lives, God willing?